Black Ridge VMS Discovery..a Bigger Reprise of Ming Mine ?The Ming copper mine was discovered by a helicopter Bourne AEM survey in 1970.
It took just 36 drill holes to delineate the mine's surface mineralization and mining began just two years later.
A former colleague of mine did a lot of the basic geological research of the Baie Verte peninsula during that period and later , was impressed with other larger VMS footprints and felt that there would be other Copper mines discovered on the Baie Verte peninsula .
In particular, he highlighted the unique possibility that such future discoveries could be equally mined as both a gold deposit and a copper base metal deposit .
Typically, decent gold mines have grades of 1-2 grams per ton.
Typically, gold and copper grades in VMS deposits are highly correlated .ie high gold grades are accompanied by high copper grades .
This is exactly what we see so far at Black Ridge where gold grades above 10 grams per ton ( the equivalent of a bonanza grade gold mine ) are accompanied by similar percentage grades of copper.
Black Ridge has a much larger foot print than Ming.
The Black Ridge property hosts several conductive and magnetic geophysical anomalies that were also identified in Maritime's 2021 versatile time domain electromagnetic ("VTEM") and magnetic surveys.
The conductive anomaly identified in the airborne VTEM survey was followed up with ground based electromagnetic surveys and generated a conductive plate anomaly measuring over 1 km in strike length.
The untested conductive anomaly occurs along strike to the northeast of the high-grade copper/gold showings and coincident with anomalous gold in soils
. A 1.5-kilometer-long northwest to southeast trending single and multi-station anomalous gold (ranging from 41 to 434 ppb Au) and copper (ranging from 50 to 266 ppm) occurs coincident with the high-grade copper, gold and silver grab samples taken by Maritime in November 2023.
There are two other large geophysical anomalies that remain to be tested this spring as part of a comprehensive exploration program including soil sampling, trenching and mapping.
Very early stage but in a contingent region that has multiple copper gold mines discoveries going back 100 years or more, it's hard not to be infected with the same optimism of new larger discoveries as my former geological mentor decades ago.