Hi Kidl,
There are several North American PGM containing intrusion trends that seem to run sort of south-west to north-east in broad terms. One runs down the Alaska corridor, another the Montana-NWT(Stillwater) corridor, another down the Thunder Bay corridor(North American Palladium), another down the Sudbury corridor(Inco, Falconbridge, Noranda), and another down the Labrador corridor(Voisey's Bay),....there are probably many others, and these are broad relationships that may be continuous or not. Some continue to other continents,...Alaska links to Russia, Sudbury links to Finland etc. All the above comments are theoretical, but you can follow these trends and see that DST has grabbed ground near several of these area plays, but that can mean little in the PGM game. Most PGM's come from a handful of mines. You have to prove up a lot of tonnage to make the mine worthwhile to develop,...but that has nothing to do with the spec game (ggggggggggggggg). A double is possible at any time on an interesting drill core.
The latest one (Corhill, NWT) that includes Uranium in the rock has a problem,...most smelters will not process radioactive ores. The radioactivity prevents the other smelted metals from being used in products humans get near. For instance any silver and coming from such a batch would include some radioactive contamination, and if that silver was used to produce photographic film, spots would form on the film from the radioactivity. Perhaps that is why Cominco let it go, even with those incredible concentrations of silver and PGM's etc,...not enough Uranium to make it worthwhile, and not much chance to cash in with the other metals. A metallurgists nightmare. |
