Tectonic Metals Inc. has commenced drilling at the company’s district-scale Seventymile Gold Project, an underexplored >40 km long late Paleozoic greenstone belt located in eastern Alaska.
Tectonic’s drill programme is specifically designed to test two targets with each drill hole:
- The newly interpreted main gold-bearing shear zone feeding the historically drilled tension veins carrying diamond drill results up to 104.75 g/t gold (Au) across 1.52 m.
- The true width, scale and continuity of the historically drilled, shallowly dipping tension veins, where select historical vertical drill holes intersected multiple stacked, high-grade gold veins.
Tony Reda, Tectonic President and CEO, commented: “It is extremely rare to come across a cohesive, 40 km long underexplored greenstone belt, such as Seventymile, in a Tier 1 jurisdiction. We begin our 2022 season with a renewed intensity, fuelled by the extensive interpretive work undertaken by our team, towards delineating what we believe to be top-tier, discovery-ready drill targets. The Tectonic team is laser-focused on executing an efficient drill programme designed to confirm these target settings and create shareholder value. We invite investors who share our enthusiasm to join us as we track down Alaska’s next great gold mine.”
Seventymile Gold Project
The Seventymile property represents an exciting and unique opportunity: an underexplored >40 km long greenstone belt in a Tier 1 jurisdiction, owned by Doyon, Ltd, a leading Native Regional Corporation and Alaska’s largest private landowner. Seventymile comprises approximately 150 000 acres of Native-Owned Land, with numerous gold zones delineated by reconnaissance drilling, trenching, and soil and rock sampling.
Tectonic’s Seventymile drill programme will focus on three targets within the highly prospective 8 km-long Flume orogenic gold trend, located in the northwestern region of the project. The 2022 drilling will target the key Flanders, Flume and Alder prospects, where shallowly-dipping, low-angle tension vein swarms occur adjacent to interpreted, largely undrilled, controlling shear structures. Limited historical diamond drilling in 1990 and 2000 at these targets demonstrated the presence of high gold grades and significant strike potential. Tectonic’s exploration campaigns from 2018 – 2020 validated and proved the continuity of these mineralised structures across the >8 km Flume trend. Drilling will focus on obtaining detailed geological information while testing for grade, scale and potential expansion at each targeted prospect.
2022 drilling at Seventymile.
Flanders
High-grade north-dipping quartz tension veins hosted by a distinctive iron-rich basalt unit are open for expansion to the northwest, east, southeast, and at depth. Diamond drilling in 1990 and 2000 by previous operators intersected two highlight diamond drill results of 104.75 g/t Au over 1.52 m and 5.3 g/t Au over 15.24 m within tensional veins, both of which are open along strike and at depth. Additionally, a 2020 Tectonic RAB infill drill hole testing extensional, tension-gash quartz-pyrite-arsenopyrite veins at Flanders returned a highlight result of 4.38 g/t Au over 6.1 m. Additionally, the 2022 programme will test for shear-hosted mineralisation at the northern structural contact of the high iron basalt unit, which is interpreted to be the controlling feature of the tension veins drilled to date.
Flume
Drilling will focus on expanding the known shear-tension vein gold mineralisation system by testing the down-dip extent of the shear while also stepping east across Flume Creek to test the interpreted continuation of the system in an undrilled area of high-tenor gold-in-soil anomalies (trace to 590 ppb Au).
Alder
Undrilled high tenor gold-in-soil anomalies with values from trace to 2.34 g/t Au found in the same iron-rich basalt as observed at the Flanders. Drilling will focus on stepping west of the historic drilling into the basalt.