White Cliff Minerals has extended its land grab in Canada by securing ground adjacent to its Rae copper-silver project that sits in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. The prospective strike at the broader project is now 72kms across copper-hosted sedimentary structures.
The company jumped on the additional 243 square kilometres of tenure it identified from preliminary geophysical data after determining it may have district-scale potential for mineralisation. The total project area has now blown out to 1198 sq km. The land acquired is to the north of its existing project and covers an additional 24km of what it terms “Rae Group sediments” along strike and increases its total landholding in the region by 20 per cent.
The company says initial processing of data from the recently completed airborne MobileMT geophysical survey confirms the area’s prospectivity, with full results expected in the coming weeks.
MobileMT is the latest airborne electromagnetic technology, combining advancements in electronics with sophisticated signal processing techniques. It uses naturally occurring electromagnetic fields mainly associated with lightning discharges over the earth and converts energy from thunderstorms to electromagnetic fields and uses these fields in the subsurface to understand variations in the electrical resistivity of the ground below the surface.
A recent $5 million capital raise, cornerstoned by the company’s strategic advisor John Hancock attracted widespread support from institutional funds based locally and in the United Kingdom, United States and Europe, ensuring it is fully-funded for the planned drill program at the site early next year.
White Cliff Minerals managing director Troy Whittaker said: “This additional 243 square kilometres of prospective ground, covers an additional 24kms of the Rae Group sediments along strike and further into the basin north of our primary sedimentary target - the Hulk, which, subject to finalising the remaining approvals and awarding Contracts we look forward to drilling commencing during Q1 2025.”
The company recently recorded some superb results from rock-chip assays, providing a hint of a sizeable copper discovery at the Rae project. A collection of about 100 samples in the maiden rock-chip sampling program were obtained from five prospective exploration districts targeting wide-spread copper mineralisation.
Management has received a suite of impressive copper, silver and gold results from the first trio of targets at Vision, Wanda and Hulk within its Rae ground.
The Don prospect within the Vision exploration district is where stellar results were returned, including a 64 per cent copper stunner found at the site, in addition to super-high grades of 62 per cent, 50.48 per cent and 43.77 per cent copper with accompanying silver assaying coming in up to 223 grams per tonne.
The Vision District is a 10km-long structural corridor sited along a sub-parallel dilutional jog, which the company believes has provided the necessary depositional environment for copper and precious metal accumulation. While it is early days in the exploration process, management suggests the Don and Pat prospects could be contiguous, giving rise to a mammoth 5km district-scale, copper-rich horizon.
White Cliff excited market punters last week with its latest rock-chip reveal, with final assays returned from the company’s maiden field program confirming the presence of high-grade copper at two of its new prospects, Rocket and Thor.
At the Rocket prospect, White Cliff made the major discovery of three parallel chalcocite-dominant vein systems sampled across a 380m strike length. The results include five super-samples with copper grades running higher than 50 per cent and silver concentrations of up to 60 grams per tonne.
Thor, sitting 20km to the west, unearthed an 800m-long zone of high-grade copper, with one sample returning 54.02 per cent copper and 34g/t silver.
The company also appears to have another Canadian beauty on its hands, with the Great Bear Lake project, about 240km south-west of Rae. Its initial field program unveiled a swag of targets for further exploration, including outcropping copper-uranium-cobalt-silver mineralisation and several off-the-charts uranium readings from a hand-held scintillometer.
White Cliff’s decision to stretch its prospective Rae ground that appears full of super high-grade copper samples, could only be viewed as a positive as the company sets itself to ramp-up its exploration efforts to the next level.
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By Craig Nolan
