Mina Claudia Geology.....
Warning: I am not even an amature geologist and did some reading to try to interpret some of the releases. The following is my understanding and speculation and any or all of it could be wrong.
An overview of this project, which we will call the Mina Claudia Project as that is one of the mineralized deposits on the hill. What we basically expect to own here is 20% of a hill, with some of the ground around the hill. There are three named deposits that we know about on three sides of the hill, the Mina Claudia, the Manto Milagrosa, and the Virgina Claim.
Many of the releases discuss "mantos" so I will tell you what my understanding of "mantos" is. I believe mantos is Spanish for
blanket. This refers to its shape which geologists call "tabular". To me that means it is shaped like a table top without the legs.
A careful reading of the press releases will reveal that the mantos is largely laying flat although tilted somewhat. So let us start with an analogy. Lay your thumb out straight and flat next to your keyboard. Now ignore everything except the fingernail on your thumb and the flesh of your thumb that is directly beneath your fingernail. Imagine the flesh beneath your fingernail to be the bottom of the hill we own as seen as if you were an eagle flying over the hill, and looking down from above. Pretend that the fingernail is the mantos "table", and that we have stripped away the top of the hill completely, until the mantos (fingernail) is entirely exposed. Ignore for now that the mantos/fingernail should be tilted.
Now as you look at your fingernail, pretend that the Manto Milagrosa is located on the lower left edge of the fingernail. Now visualize the Mina Claudia as being placed on the upper left edge of the fingernail. Then the Virgina Claim would be on the upper right edge of the fingernail. As you can see, the possibility exists that all three claims are connected in one large mantos/table structure. It would be in a horizontal although tilted slice through the whole hill.
Where the hill had eroded to meet the mantos, you would be able to see
green mineralization on the surface of the hill. The press releases talk about some work that had been done to establish that the rim of the mantos table extends between the Manto Milagrosa and the Mina Claudia and maybe it could extend to the Virgina Claim as well.
So I have been briefly on the phone and this is my current understanding. That the mantos is projected to be in table form, and is tilted 30 degrees from the Mina Claudia down to the Manto Milagrosa. That the Virgina Claim runs up partially into the hill as well as into the surrounding ground.
How does mantos get there you might ask? You will be sorry you did.
Mantos is a metamorphic process. That is it occurs when rock changes
form due to heat, pressure, or chemical reaction. So one way would be if the hill is already there. It is composed at least partly of igneous rock, rock that is formed by cooling lava or sedimentary rock. So this rock acts as the "host" rock. It is the the rock that will be
changed into mantos. Often it is porous, having small holes that will let the hot magma travel through it causing the change. It is sometimes sandwiched in between two layers of impermeable rock, that the magma can not readily pass through. So the magma confines itself to the host rock. The magma comes from inside the earth and forces it's way up into the hill probably through a fault, and is known as "intrusive" rock. It then changes the host rock through a hydrothermal process to mantos, and presto we all make money. The reason I am going into this, is that this process does not just necessarily happen once in a hill, and we probably bought the rest of the hill for a reason, and there were other claims on the hill other than the two mentioned.
It is also quite possible that the mantos formed before the hill did. That the mantos could have formed under water probably using sedimentary rock (rocks formed out of bits and pieces of other rocks, minerals, organic matter) as the "host" rock (the rock that will become mantos).That the hill thrust up through "part" of the mantos in a volcanic process bringing up a section of the mantos with it, and embedding the mantos inside the newly formed hill. If the hill remained under water for many years, leaching of the copper from the hill and concentration of the copper leached from the hill into the ground could have occured. Note this additional copper could be added to already existing copper containing mantos. Eventually, of course, the water would have drained away, leaving the current dry land. I believe erosion and concentration could still have continued, stopping at the water table. This would leave a possible high concentration of copper in the ground as well as the mantos in the hill.
Of course it is important to keep in mind that we don't know if these three depostits are connected. This is just what is postulated. We don't know if the ground contains a concentrated deposit, this is just a possability that remains to be tested.
Both the Mina Claudia and the Manto Milagrosa have returned assays
greater than 2% and we know that Phelps Dodge next door is doing fine with 1%. Of course those samples were relatively shallow samples. Mantos when understood, normally has a fairly consistent grade. So after we drill we should get a pretty good idea of what we have got.
I believe the Phelps Dodge mine near ours is an open pit mine. They had no volcanics to push their mantos up where it was easy to get at. We should not have to remove the large amount of overburden that they did. We may not experience the high waste to ore ratio that they experience. In other words it may be that production is signifigantly cheaper.
I must remind everyone that I got this off the net and out of basic geology books and am liable to be making serious errors. |
