EXPLORATION ROUNDUP — ProAm funds drilling at Golden Boy project — Cons. Venturex earning 10% stake

Two Canadian mining companies have agreed to fund a work program managed by ProAm Explorations (PMX-V) at the Golden Boy project near Winnipeg, Man.

Consolidated Venturex Holdings (CVA-V) and Pizay Investments, a private company, can each earn a 10% interest in the project by making staged payments totalling $800,000 in cash and shares. The funds will be used to diamond drill targets defined by gravity and aeromagnetic surveys over a 75,750-ha area in a newly discovered and virtually untested greenstone belt.

The program will focus on a gravity anomaly surrounded by an annular ring of aeromagnetic anomalies that were first delineated by government surveys in the 1950s and 1960s. The anomalies are believed to have their source in the Precambrian basement, which is overlain by about 100 to 150 metres of Phanerozoic sedimentary rocks.

Several decades ago, three diamond drill holes tested these features and encountered mafic metavolcanic rocks, metasedimentary rocks, metagabbros, norites and sulphide-bearing iron formations. Some of the mafic metavolcanics were reported to exhibit features typical of footwall stringer zones found under volcanogenic massive sulphide deposits.

The Manitoba government’s geological services branch tested the anomalies with two holes earlier this year. The first hit iron formation intruded by gabbro and stringers, blebs and disseminated sulphides, including chalcopyrite. The second encountered serpentinized dunite lying below pyrite-enriched Ordovician sandstones. ProAm notes that none of these rock types can adequately explain the “profound excess of mass indicated by the gravity anomaly and the coincident magnetic anomalies.”

ProAm’s geological team has generated a geological model, based on observed drill results and geophysics, which points to the existence of a layered ultramafic-mafic complex intrusive into typical Precambrian greenstone assemblages. The company notes that the project area lies in a metallogenic belt known for chromite, nickel-copper, cobalt and platinum group elements related to another layered complex, the Bird River Sill.

The work program also will examine the area’s potential to host volcanogenic massive-sulphide deposits, iron formation-hosted gold deposits and other deposit types that might occur in the Phanerozoic cover.