Snowstorm Drilling To Follow-Up on Promising Gold Intersections
TORONTO - Seabridge Gold is mobilizing equipment to initiate drilling at its 100%-owned Snowstorm Project in Nevada. Snowstorm is located 15 km north of Turquoise Ridge on a blind extension of the prolific Getchell Trend. This drilling program is designed to follow-up on results that found discrete gold-bearing intervals hosted within a similar structural setting and rocks as the Turquoise Ridge Mine.
The program is designed to re-enter existing drill holes and use directional drilling tools to continue the drill hole from known gold-bearing intersections toward prospective higher-grade feeder structures. An initial program of about 2,500 meters of exploration drilling is planned for this program.
Rudi Fronk, Chairman and CEO, said, "Our multi-year exploration program at Snowstorm has found gold-bearing structures which support the potential for an economic deposit. We are now planning to step out from the gold system we have identified to evaluate nearby structures as pathways for gold-bearing fluids. Snowstorm requires a disciplined sequential exploration approach in part because the target strata lie under a thick package of young volcanic rocks. Using directional drilling techniques, we can re-enter previously-drilled holes, re-direct them to new targets and shorten the required drilling.”
Results from the four drill holes completed in 2020 provided positive outcomes in our search for gold-bearing fluid pathways. Two of the holes encountered intensely altered intermediate intrusive rocks sited at stratigraphic breaks. These intrusive rocks and wall rocks footwall to the intrusions are sheared and contain abundant silica introduction. Shearing and alteration in these rocks represent a low angle or thrust fault within the Paleozoic stratigraphy which provided a fluid pathway, associated with the sheared and altered zones are gold, arsenic, and silver concentrations one to two orders of magnitude above background intensities.
The 2021 program is designed to off-set these previous intersections toward a structure with a topographic expression which is projected into the Paleozoic section using magnetotelluric (MT) geophysical readings. The surface expression of this structure has produced a significant arsenic in soil anomaly. These initial off-sets will provide additional pierce points on the gold-bearing features and could refine the vectoring toward a Getchell Trend gold occurrence.