Aurora drills busy

As a second phase of drilling begins, Aurora Platinum (ARP-V) has seven drill rigs on their way to the Foy, Lansdowne and Midrim-Belleterre projects.

The 19.5-sq.-km Foy project covers part of a series of giant cracks that radiate outward from the Sudbury Basin. Two rigs will test deep electromagnetic conductors delineated in geophysical drill holes collared north of the original sulphide discoveries. They will also expand mineralization cut 440 metres below Nickel Lake. Drilling will also focus along the Sudbury Igneous Complex-Footwall contact, where the company has discovered several massive nickel-copper sulphide zones and several airborne electromagnetic conductors.

One drill rig is operating on the Footwall project in Sudbury, near the Falconbridge mine. A second rig may be added later. Aurora has completed a tightly spaced 50-metre airborne electromagnetic and magnetic survey. It revealed significant conductors and deep geophysical targets.

Aurora can earn a 60% interest in the properties from Falconbridge (FL-T) by spending $6 million on exploration over three years. Falco can back into a 70% interest by completing a bankable feasibility study and putting any discovery into production.

Three drill rigs are headed to the Midrim-Belleterre project in Qubec. One will focus on expanding high-grade, nickel-copper mineralization delineated in previous drilling, including the newly discovered Midrim Deep zone. Another will test for lateral and vertical extensions of mineralization at Alotta. The third rig will test the Patrie, Delphi, Duschene and Zullo nickel-copper zones. Aurora plans to deploy a fourth rig in the summer to test several electromagnetic conductors.

Aurora can earn an initial 70% interest in the Midrim property by spending $1.2 million on exploration, paying $200,000 in cash and issuing $200,000 worth of shares over three years. Once Aurora has vested, the owner will either contribute, dilute to a 2% net smelter return royalty, or elect to sell its interest, over which Aurora retains a right of first refusal.

At Aurora’s wholly owned Lansdowne House project in northern Ontario, a single drill rig will test 15 conductive zones defined in an airborne survey. A second rig will join it later in the summer. In March, four widely spaced holes (up to 4 km apart) cut disseminated and massive sulphides. Preliminary assay results returned a 1.4-metre intersection assaying 2.1 grams combined platinum-palladium. Further results are pending.

Lansdowne covers the bulk of a mafic-ultramafic layered intrusive that extends for some 20 km in strike length. Outcrop is generally poor, but limited rock-sampling indicates that the complex is anomalous in PGMs. Drilling by Inco in the 1960s intersected both massive and disseminated nickel-copper-PGM mineralization over a large area. Aurora is targeting a large, low-grade system.