A new type of gold occurrence which could have mine-making potential for Nova Scotia has been discovered by a private company Tri-Explorations of Halifax.
Mineralization from a strongly carbonitized unit of greywacke is being investigated by microprobe analysis at Dalhousie University in Halifax for the mineral resources division of the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources.
The mineralization, consisting of grains of native gold and gold alloyed with silver, copper, lead and tungsten, was discovered by accident in a rock quarry on ground near Brookfield, Queens Cty., said Alex Thomson of Tri-Ex. A local construction company had blasted some 13,000 tonnes of the greywacke for road construction material. Some 10,000 tonnes of crushed rock had been hauled away when John Dawe, president of Tri-Ex, had samples from the quarry stockpile assayed. The samples returned values as high as four grams gold per tonne.
Trenching has since outlined a gold-bearing zone 40 metres in true thickness extending at least 100 metres along strike and open in all directions. Tri-Ex controls 301 claims in the area.
“The mineralization is unlike anything we’ve seen before,” said longtime government geologist Paul Smith. He made his findings public at the recent annual colloquium in Halifax of the Atlantic Geoscience Society, a division of the Geological Survey of Canada.
“Our best guess at this point is that the textures suggest replacement of organic material,” Smith says. If this is so, it would suggest a stratabound control model, he added.
Tri-Ex is seeking financing for 750 metres of drilling to further explore the property.
The discovery is unlike the narrow, quartz-vein-type deposits which occur throughout the Meguma Group rocks of southwestern Nova Scotia, Smith says, and is quite different from the Touquoy deposit which is hosted in a carbonitized argillite.
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