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Gold/Mining/Energy : Donner Minerals (DML.V) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Surething who wrote (2345)	12/13/1997 10:34:00 PM
From: Walt	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 11676

Greetings all, thought I would try to clarify a couple terms. Massive sulphides vs disseminated sulphides. These are terms used by field geologists to describe hoe they find the mineralization in rocks. You look at a rock and if you see a few sulphides scattered throughout it, you make the notation weakly disseminated sulphides. Disseminated means the sulphides are scattered through out. As the percentation of sulphides grows the geo will estimate the percentation 5% 10% etc. Massive means the rock is composed mostly of sulphdes visually. What the exact % is varies some. I cannt find exact numbers (so dont hold me to this) but semi massive 15-35% and massive over 35%. Its a visual determination and a usefull field descriptive tool. Sulphides could also be bedded, banded, stringers, stockwork, lens etc etal depending what they appear as. Problem is there are alot of sulphide minerals pyrite, arsenopyrite, pyrrhotite etc. But sulphur combined with iron isnt worth much per ton. Then you have chalcopyrite, bornite, sphalerite, galena and a whole range of sulphide minerals which get interesting as copper, nickel, zink,cobalt,lead, etc enter the picture.Also gold silver and platinum get tied up within the sulphides. So the geologists and prospectors, try to note and describe them but it gets pretty difficult to pick them all out and to quess what the rock is going to run. (especially during the initial exploration stage.) Each deposit and occurence has its similiarities and its peculiarities. There are whole text books written on sulphide minerals. In time no doubt there will be hundreds of Phd papers written on Voiseys Bay. I hope the above info helps. One of the problems is taking very detailed subjects like geology, minerology, geochemistry, geophysics, mining etc and putting them into terms the investing public will understand and appreciate. Assays themselves can be very decieving as was just shown. I know the current numbers obviously werent what people wanted to hear but from an exploration stand point they are very encouraging especially with the step outs involved with these holes. Everyone wants the next hole to be bigger and better then the last but in exploration it just doesnt work that way. In fact when you drill off a zone or deposit you have to hit alot of blank holes in order to define the size and shape of the deposit. Regards Walt Humphries ps Im a working prospector not a geologist for what its worth