Shallow Copper Porphyry Drill Target Defined At San Antonio

 

VANCOUVER, BC - Barksdale Capital Corp. reported the initial drill target at the Cosmos porphyry copper-molybdenum-silver-gold prospect on its recently acquired, and 100% owned, San Antonio property in Santa Cruz County, Arizona. President and CEO, Rick Trotman said, "We believe that our newly acquired San Antonio project has a high value copper porphyry target located under shallow gravel cover. We acquired the project because we saw clear indications of a potentially large porphyry system that could yield a significant shallow discovery for the benefit of our shareholders. The last major discovery of a copper porphyry in the United States was Resolution in 1995, so we're very pleased that we've been able to add this exciting opportunity to our portfolio. Our team is actively developing a drill program to test Cosmos as soon as possible."

The Patagonia mountain range hosts a series of early Tertiary aged intrusions that have been emplaced into a series of Precambrian and Paleozoic rocks. These intrusions are known to host multiple copper porphyry copper deposits, which were discovered and explored by various mining companies in the 1970's and 1980's. This historic work has identified three deposits that have been partially delineated by modern drilling, including the Sunnyside, Red Mountain, and Ventura deposits. These productive porphyries have been shown to be large (>200 million tons to +1 billion tons) and are typically well mineralized, yielding average grades between 0.25% and 0.60% copper, with accompanying credits of molybdenum, gold, and silver. The historic challenge has been that the previous discoveries generally occur at significant depths, extending from 400m to over 1,500m. To date, these porphyry copper deposits have not shown themselves to be economically viable, but the distal high-grade mineral deposits associated with their emplacement have been mined for over a 100 years, including epithermal silver-lead-zinc, copper-bearing breccia pipes, and sedimentary rock hosted silver-lead-zinc mantos and skarns. The current focus of district exploration efforts is on the manto and skarn deposits, such as those at Sunnyside (Barksdale) and Taylor-Hermosa (South32). The discovery of a shallow copper porphyry, which is what is being targeted at Cosmos, would likely have a much lower economic threshold for development than the deep known copper porphyry deposits in the district.