Chapleau Resources (CHI-V) has inked a deal to earn up to a 60% interest in Navigator Exploration‘s (NVR-V) Kougarok tantalum property in the Seward Peninsula, about 112 km from Nome, Alaska.
Initially, Chapleau can earn a 50% stake by funding US$1 million in exploration before the end of 2003. The company can boost its interest to 60% by spending another US$500,000 by the end of 2004.
The property was previously explored by Anaconda Minerals, which, in the early 1980s, conducted about 10,000 metres of drilling, 1,100 metres of bulldozer trenching, geological mapping, grid geochemical sampling and detailed gravity surveys.
The major spent about US$5.5 million to determine the property’s tin potential. Tantalum mineralization was encountered incidental to the tin mineralization. However, exploration ceased in the mid-1980s with the collapse of tin prices.
Navigator says the property contains a large magmatic-hydrothermal system containing tantalum-tin mineralized greisens in a strongly evolved fluorine-lithium granite. This geological setting is similar to economic tantalum deposits elsewhere in the world which also host rare-metal mineralization.
Based on past work, the mineralized system at Kougarok is believed to have a surface geological and geochemical expression of more than 1,200 metres by 1,000 metres. Only two of a number of mineralized areas have been studied in detail. Some metallurgical test work was done and results indicate that the deposits are not metallurgically complex.
Chapleau plans to carry out a diamond drilling program aimed at increasing and expanding the previously indicated area of high-grade tantalum mineralization. Geological mapping will be carried out in other project areas and drilling of the best targets will follow.
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