Automated transcript · Written by software from the replay's audio. It can mishear names and figures; the replay is the record.
28:59 the people, the experience, the workforce, it's got everything going for it as a jurisdiction. And at some point, there will be a supply crunch, which will sort itself out, right? The supply will arise to meet the demand, either at home or from away, right? And I've actually have spoken to multiple diamond drilling and other exploration service companies, for example, that are owned and operated by Newfoundlanders who've been working in Northern Ontario, in Northern Manitoba, who are actually packing up and getting ready to go home. And I can tell you that as a New Brunswicker who's lived everywhere but since the age of 16, it's nice to be able to, you know, think about working a whole lot closer to home and so I think that will have a lot of attractiveness for the people who've been able to live there and those who've had to live away for all kinds of good reasons over the years. Yeah absolutely, I mean it does sound like a pretty solid setup, match made in heaven type thing for a bunch of the reasons you just painted.
30:06 Erin, let me ask you a bit about honing in on targets and then hopefully you know hitting into the discoveries that you're looking for. Quite a few of the companies here have pretty big land packages, pretty new land packages, lots of things that look interesting on those land packages. And so now you're starting the work of figuring out where the good hits might be within those big land packages. But you're doing that for better or worse in the context of very high investor expectations, right, because of the successes that have already taken place. So you want to talk a bit about the process and maybe like the process of targeting. And I know that's a bit of a nebulous question without being so specific to your own projects, but the process of targeting and sort of the approach that companies have to take in that And maybe in the context of setting investor expectations, like we can't expect that every hole, that the first drill program of every hole is gonna return 100 grams gold.
31:10 Well, you know, you start off with your geo chem or your prospecting is going on, then you either option it off, you find investors and stuff like that. But eventually you get to a drill program that you have soil samples, You have hand samples in the area. You've got enough sampling that you've got an idea of what's underneath the ground. And you have historical information on previous drilling or something like that that you can go on. So you create a model of theoretically what's underneath the ground, right? And then you need to pick out your drill targets as to the highest amount of gold that you're going to get.
31:59 And you need to pick that target as to what your host rock is going to be, what the highest probability of getting quartz veins in terms of gold exploration. And It's kind of like shooting fish in the ocean a lot of times. You don't know if you're going to hit it. You make your best guess, like 75 to 85 percent right. A lot of times you swing and you miss and sometimes you hit it out of the park. We hit a lot of dusters, right? But we hit a couple of really good ones.
32:44 Yeah, right. So But that's the name of the game, right? If they were all going to be good, what's the point in doing it because it would be boring and you won't reward nothing. But basically you need as much information as you can possibly get on a play. And then you can start putting holes in the ground And the more holes you put in the ground, the better your chances of hitting stuff, because you got the information to target stuff. Right? And from what Mark was saying, the geologic survey has a good starting point for that sort of information. And then do you want to just add in just some context, what sort of geophysics appears to be helpful, so for the investors listening, in this district? Because, you know, geophysics to a lot of investors is just colorful blobs and lines on a map, so maybe some reference around that in this area.
33:48 Well, we did a magnetic survey, which gave us a lot of information. Resistivity survey might work just as good, But with the graphite in our particular area, like the magnetics, it defines a graphite area, which is where we don't want to drill. So everything else is more of a target. But different magnetic surveys give you different results. Right? But I think, what did they run? Was it a magnetic survey on a newfound goal? I believe it was. Does someone want to help? Someone want to help me out with that? It's an EM, I think.
34:35 Okay, yeah, yeah. But, you know, generally, like, everything will give you different information as to, like, you know, cords veining or, you know, graphite anomalies or something like that. Sure. I'm going to get to some questions that are coming in from the audience in just a moment. But first, I'm going to ask Mike 1 more question, which is you pointed to this in your introduction, which was about using AI to help you in the type of process that I just had Aaron describe, which is going from a huge land package with a bunch of things that look interesting based on a list of different data packages. Do you wanna describe, this is partly from a question that came in as well, the AI system, like someone asks are you using the same AI program that Great Bear used?
35:25 That's not, I mean that you can answer that question absolutely, but do you want to talk about AI a little bit more deeply and what it is, how it works, and how you're hoping that it will help exploits? Yeah, okay, I'm happy to do that. I guess there are a number of people out there who specialize in the AI interrogation of geological data sets. Really what we've done is we've compiled all of the various assessment reports and geological data that we have, the mapping that the government has done, the regional soil and tills and and lake sediments then we add into that The work that we've done in the last year and on top of that all we're basically taking the airborne survey that we've flown Which is VTEM Which is an EM survey and adding in magnetics with it as well. And you look at the relationships between those things and looking to identify, A, the deep-seated structures, also, and looking to identify the demagnetized zones, which indicate that you've got a higher hydrothermal fluid flow through the rocks. Warmer water basically converts magnetite into hematite and other things like that.
36:50 So you've got destruction of magnetite and that identifies, so you look for your structure and then you say well has anything gone through it or is it just a tight fault? Because faults can be conduits for fluids or they can be barriers to fluids. So you've got to be able to differentiate the 2. And then you're looking for intersections of these structures with those things. And you can do that line by line going through compiling all that into a GIS system and looking at the lines of information that you have from your airborne survey and then looking at all that other information underneath it. But to do that line by line would take us years, Whereas AI can do that sort of in a few days. And then we've got highlighted targets, and we have experienced geophysicists and geologists who go through that data set and rank those targets and pick the ones that we think need to be followed up and we don't.
37:46 There are, as I said, a number of different public companies and private groups. Some people have internal AI strategies. So you can go a lot of different directions with this. I guess for us going with Gold Spot was a bit of a no-brainer because they have already demonstrated their ability to make discoveries in the camp and they've kind of tuned their their artificial intelligence program to the camp And it's not really you can't just say okay. Well, I've worked out how this works with Great Bear. Now I'm going to go look at stuff in the Western Pilbara in Australia and get the same results. It's garbage in, garbage out with computers. So you've got to have the data set, but you have to have a real thought of what you're looking for in your AI. So it's got to be driven by knowledgeable people.
38:41 Yeah, but with a huge land package over 2,000 square kilometers of ground, we just couldn't cover it. So this is a very effective way of moving targets forward and and being able to hit them with the drill quickly. And time is money and you know investors lose patience very quickly so we've got to be able to drive discovery as quickly as possible. Absolutely. Roger, I haven't been ignoring you in this conversation. I know I only asked you one question at the beginning, but that's partly because a bunch of the questions that have been coming in from the audience are about your drill hit. So I'm gonna dive into that for a few moments. Everyone else can just go get a coffee or something. So, I mean, I'll compile some of these questions, but does, I mean, great news today, does what you intersected today change your drilling plan there, your drilling plan at the main vein. Does it change how you're approaching that, or is it continue on the path?
39:42 We have a drilling strategy in place. But it is one that is evolving. To say that we're just going to drill these holes and drill them regardless of what the results are, I don't think is something that any geologist would do. So, whenever we get results, we analyze those results and we adapt our draw plan accordingly. And we do that on the fly. As everybody's aware, the turnaround times at the labs are on the order of, I don't know what they are now, 5, 6 weeks, I think, for regular samples. But we do use portable XRF in the core shack on every hole. And it's really that that allows us to to tinker or really just tweak tweak the drill program as to what we're seeing in the portable XRF. But it's basically as Aaron alluded to earlier, it's arsenic and antimony is what we're looking at. And where we see arsenic and antimony starting to pick up, that's where we know we're onto something.
40:56 And we've seen antimony minerals in the core. We've seen arsenopyrite in the core. So those are things that we use to tweak our strategy. Expanding on that, I mean that obviously makes great sense, Expanding on that question a bit, there's several people who've been asking about, you know, continuing with scope holes, a long strike versus now trying to go deeper or trying to understand plunge of higher grades based on, I mean, obviously you basically have one key data point now. So yeah, what's your response to that? If someone's asking you, are you going to start doing some deeper drilling to understand plunge of higher grade chutes?
41:43 Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, We've intersected the visible gold in 4 drill holes. We've had results back from 2. And we're targeting that ore chute. That's our key right now. And I think we have to hit it hard until we understand how that thing is plunging. And we don't understand that yet. So we have some ideas, but the geology is really complex, folding, faulting, which is a good thing, because that's why the gold's there. It comes along these structures, and it gets trapped by fold nodes and things like that. So it's good to have complex structure, but you know, on the other hand, it's a bit of a challenge for the geos, and who I must say are doing an incredible job.
42:45 They're just doing a great job of teasing out the structure. And then of course you're in that, the battle that always presents when you get into a nice high-grade hit in a vein type structure, which is how far do you step, right? You want to take big steps to see how big this thing is versus taking small steps that you have a bit more confidence in and the market I'm sure wants you to do both and everything all at the same time. Of course they do. We're really following the strategy that Refund gold has been so successful with, baby steps, basically. Their last hole, which was phenomenal, was the 60-meter step-out down plunge, and they hit the best hole that they had. I'd love to do that, but you can only do that when you're confident in where things are going.
43:39 And as Heather just said, we're not there yet. We will be stepping out. I mean, we've got a, You know, the big vein itself, what's a surface is 400 meters. We've drilled about 80 meters, a long strike with that. And then after that, we have another 12 kilometers, the Appleton Fault, which is showing up in different places. Things are popping up. So yeah, we're going to be stepping out big time. But right now, the focus is nailing that high grade. Gotcha. Okay, I'm going to move on to another few questions specific to companies Mike someone was asking are you drilling? I think the fun answer is that you've just started like today. But do you want to talk about your first, second, and third targets in this nascent drill program?
44:25 Yeah, so we are drilling. I'm very excited to be doing that. That's of course a sea of change in what we're doing. We're drilling at Schooner, which is about 3 and a half kilometers to the west of the Keats zone on a parallel structure called the Schooner Fault. We started last Thursday, I think, we started turning a drill. So things are progressing there quite nicely. Usual hiccups with getting things going consistently, but we're pretty excited. We've got our office open now in Gander and our Corshack there waiting for, well actually I think there might be some boxes in there now. So that's, yeah, it's all very exciting. We are beyond Schooner, which is basically, it's a structure that's parallel to the Appleton off to the west.
45:17 Looks very much like geophysical target that exists at Keats. We're looking at fault splays there and secondary and tertiary structures coming off of the Schooner Fault itself, So looking for areas where we can see golds coming up through the system, but has enough room in the secondary tertiary or splays to be able to bloom and create a significant amount of gold in a deposit. And that's really our target there. I think our next drill program will probably be up at the Quinlan veins in the north. We've got some really nice VG in outcrop there, a number of samples I think ranging from 64 to the 20s, 20 grams per ton gold in our crop.
46:10 And we're really excited about that. It's a wide zone of quartz veining on a secondary structure coming off of the Appleton, which is really the model that we've got to look for. And we think we can extend that fault on strike or those vein structures quite a distance. We think that's a super opportunity. We also see a, we think it's a tertiary structure and geophysics coming off of that. So this is the structural complexity that you really need to build a lot of ounces, potentially build a lot of ounces. Past that, it's kind of a toss up between Little Joanna, where we've got our best grade in outcrop, so I think 194 grams gold, or Jonathan's Pond. Jonathan's Pond, we want to do a little bit more work on to really clean up our targeting there before we start pushing holes into that. But that's a really exciting large-scale target and a little bit different.
47:09 Mark Scott and I with Sassy were focused there on the grub line, which is a bit of a different rock type, but again, deep seated structures, we know there's gold coming out there. We've got 28 grams visible gold and outcrop there. So we know the system is gold bearing. It's just identifying these structures and getting, keying in on these, the areas of significant deformation where you can form these deposits. All right, that's a good context layout from exploits. Aaron, do you want to, I know you have results that are coming in in the next little while and then you're, you know, kicking off summer work programs as well. Do you want to lay out the scene of where you you know the targets that you have been testing what your what your plans are for the summer just so that those who are interested know what to look for in news from Sky.
48:04 Well we just had a 19-hole drill program over the winter that's just taken a long time for the assays to come back. So we're, you know, over the next couple weeks potentially we're going to have all those results put out and press released. As far as it goes over the summer, we're looking at maybe August to September for a start date for a new drill program on Mustang. And we're going to do another soil sampling program, geochemistry and sampling, and potentially drilling on the Virginia property, which is right underneath the Rogers property.
48:51 So there's some exciting stuff coming up. Mark, I'm going to give you sort of the same opportunity. Gander, I mean, you're sort of just finishing, I don't even know if you are finished pulling together land, but that's certainly what the focus has been. But now you have a bunch of cash, a bunch of it from Eric, who has been an important funding mechanism for this area of play, for the gold exploration industry worldwide, but specifically for Newfoundland these days. So you have land and you have cash, what's the summer plan for Gander? We have engaged Sean Ryan and Kathy Wood and Ground Truth Exploration to basically run our program for the summer. That lets us hit the ground running without having to spend a lot of time and money starting up and getting our own infrastructure in place. They have a a 30-person crew already working in the area and in fact started till sampling just this morning I believe on our Gander North project just right next door to Michael's Johnston's Pond target.
49:52 So we've started the program there. We think we'll spend sort of in this phase 1 early exploration program this year, about 3 and a half million dollars. We're gonna be flying fixed wing mag survey over all 2,257 square kilometers as soon as possible, starting in a few weeks' time. We're going to do the same with LIDAR. We're collecting all of the aerial photography and things such that we need to sort of do the desktop prospecting and then we will have the Ground Truth crews doing their soil and till sampling program across the priority structures that we've identified on all of our project areas on the island. So that'll be followed up with some probing and exploratory rab drilling and then diamond drilling for most of the project areas, the exception being the Gander North project, the portion of it in that Jonathan's Pond area where we optioned a block of claims from Vulcan Minerals and have a drill permit in place.
51:00 Based on the results of this early till sampling that we've started and the follow-up in that, we expect to be doing some exploratory orientation diamond drilling in that area this summer. Maybe as much as 1500 meters, so not a large program, but that'll get us started drilling on the island. And then of course, sort of corporately, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention over on the left coast, we're flying a VTEM survey over the 146 square kilometer Foremoor property at the moment, and we'll be drilling there following up on the Westmore discovery zone from last summer next month. So lots lots on the go on on either side of the country. For sure. Okay now here's my last question and you're each going to have to answer it, and it's a bit of a tricky one, which is outside of projects that land targets that your companies own, so Roger can't choose anything that Labrador owns, Michael can't choose anything that Exploits owns, what is your favorite exploration target on the island? I mean this is just a wealth of knowledge of who's got what and who's doing what in Newfoundland, so I'm taking advantage of it to ask each of you which target outside of your own are you watching for results from this summer with interest?
52:22 Roger, how would I pick on you first? Newfound Gold. Okay. Are you gonna eliminate that as an option? I feel like I should maybe eliminate Newfound, because they're already worth $800 million or whatever. You probably should. You know what? It's probably an unfair question in some ways, because some companies are further along than others, and we don't really know what the ground has yet. So I go for structure. I know that Exploits has done quite a bit of work up around Jonathan's pond. I was following that quite closely. And I don't think, Mike, you've had anything out from it recently, but I'm going to be very interested to see when you get a drill on it.
53:15 Because that looks, to me, that looks really good. It's on the structure. It's, you've got high grade at surface. So yeah, I think that's 1 I will be watching. And fair enough that absolutely there's targets of all stages across Newfoundland right now. Some of them very early. I mean, Mark's talking about how they're just starting soil sampling, so obviously Mark's targets are very early. But that's the nature of the game, right? We always have targets across a wide range of stages. So I'm just asking the question based on what's available right now. Mike, what target areas maybe would you wish that exploits could have gotten when you were establishing your land package or what are you watching outside of your ground? Who's the bell of the ball? I guess I would say in a sweeping statement that I actually really like all the projects that my co-presenters have here today. I think these are great. But if I'm looking for an outlier that's not on the screen today, I'd probably pick CanStar down to the south.
54:14 They've got grub line targets. And we actually, I think we did talk with the vendors on a couple of those pieces of ground early on and it's very much a grub line target which we believe in and we think is sort of the sleeper in the camp. And that's, yeah, that would be one of the things I think that people should look at. Cool, Aaron, what are you looking for? I'm just gonna hop outside the Queensway and say the Bureau of Peninsula. It's a really interesting place. And it's got a lot of potentially potential gold finds in it that I don't think many people have looked at. And which companies? Public Palm Resources is a company, they've got an operation down there right now.
55:01 But it's something to look at. Interesting. OK. Outside ideas. I like it. Mark, what about you? Well, again, I wouldn't want to dismiss anybody's odds of making a discovery. The prospectivity of this ground from the long range fault in the west to the hermitage system and the grub line and even outboard of that to the east all through central Newfoundland is a highly prospective, very exciting piece of ground. And all the presenters today and all who've been on here the last 3 days have some really interesting properties. If I had to choose some, I'd choose some of my neighbors, I guess, selfishly, Jonathan's Pond and the Mount Payton Linear that exploits have and Eastern Pond that NFG has very close to our Gander South property and Moosehead across the way from Mount Payton and Matador, which were sidled right up to down on the Cape Reef Fault in a different, down towards Port of Baskin, a different part of the province.
56:10 So, you know, there are going to be multiple discoveries here. Some companies are further along, but you know, the 4 million soon to be 5, I'm sure million ounce deposit at Marathon and what NFG is doing and what Matador has, they're gonna turn into a million plus ounce deposit and bring into production. Exploits and Lab are a little further along and then, you know, a whole group of juniors, Sassy and Gander and Sky Gold included, are gonna take advantage of this building knowledge about the geology of the island. And I think we're gonna see multiple handfuls of really significant economic discoveries over the coming months and the next several years. Well that's a positive note to end on.
56:56 Not that there's been much in the way of negative in this conversation but that's a nice positive note to end on. One question came in just at the end here and I'm just going to take a quick stab at answering it. It's a hard one to answer. For the new, what should we as investors be looking for in both the long and short term to gauge the likelihood of high-grade fines from different companies out there? I mean my answer to that, because I get that sort of question all the time from subscribers, is first of all, understand what the company's trying to do. If they can explain it well, it shouldn't matter whether you're a geologist or not, they need to be able to explain what they're doing, why they're doing it, and why they think it's gonna work, and if it does work, what that might mean. So what the results would look like if it works. If you can understand the story and therefore have some understanding of the results when they come out, that means that they have a clear plan, they're executing on that plan, And that is the most important starting point. It's amazing actually how often that's missing in exploration companies, a very clear plan, but that's the starting point. And then as we sort of touched on in this conversation, this is a new area. There's a huge number of targets being tested. So it's also helpful if a company is testing multiple different targets. As Aaron mentioned at one point there, you know, we turn up a lot of dusters in this industry because we're trying to find things that are literally hidden under the ground. And so you do all the best groundwork that you can, and then you drill to see what's actually down there. If a company is drilling more than 1 promising looking target, that's just more kicks at the can. The odds of success
58:26 are higher if they have more than 1 target that they're testing as a first phase approach. So that's my quick answer to that question because I just don't really have time to turn it over to the guys again. Thank you Mark, Roger, Aaron and Michael for joining us today on this panel. And now I'm going to turn it over to a talk that we are all, those of us on the panel, are interested to listen into, which is Richard Goldfarb. So he is a director of C2C Gold. He's also a geologist, very familiar with Newfoundland terrain and how the Newfoundland gold exploration picture is evolving. And he has a talk for us now on precisely that topic. So without further ado, we will move into that. I will mention that this is the last day of the Virtual Investor Day Summit, so if you want to keep up to date with all things Newfoundland, then sign up to receive the newsletter at newfoundland.gold.
59:21 We were chatting before this started that you can get dot gold as a website. I don't know why every exploration company in the world doesn't have dot gold as a website, but the Newfoundland team figured it out. So go to newfoundland.gold. You can sign up for the newsletter and it will help you keep abreast of everything that's happening in this exciting area of play. Thank you so much for tuning in and enjoy Richard's talk on geology. Thanks everybody. Thanks Gwen. Thanks guys. Thanks, Gwen. Thanks, guys. Well, hello, everybody. It's good to be here, even though it's on virtual. But my name is Rich Goldfarb. I'm a geologist. I'm also on the board of Sea to Sea Gold Corporation, one of the companies working in Newfoundland.
1:00:08 And I've also been involved with gold in the academic world for many decades. And what I want to do is talk to you today about Newfoundland and why it's so prospective. What in the geology about Newfoundland makes it so exciting for gold exploration today? And so I'll focus on 2 aspects to this talk. First, just what kind of gold is in Newfoundland and what are the geologic features of that gold that make large tonnage deposits? And then we'll look at Newfoundland and see why those features sit in Newfoundland and why Newfoundland is so exciting for gold potential. Gold's been known in Newfoundland for more than 100 years. We can go back into scientific journals, such as nature in the 1880s, where they've talked about some of the gold-bearing veins that were just discovered at that time in the northwest corner of the central part of Newfoundland.
1:01:15 Going to more recent times, there are a number of publications by the Geological Survey of Newfoundland and Labrador talking about gold resources in Newfoundland. So about 15 years ago, gold resources were recognized mainly in 2 types of deposits, massive sulfides and gold only deposits. At the time, maybe the estimates were just under a million ounces of gold resources in Newfoundland. And what I'm going to focus on today are the gold only deposits. They're what we term in economic geology, orogenic gold deposits. Historically, most of those that you see here on the Bay of Verde Peninsula. But over the last 15 years, with exciting finds such as in Valentine Lake and on the Dog Bay Line, more and more of these orogenic gold deposits have been recognized in the center of New Zealand, in the center of Newfoundland along many of these major fault systems.
1:02:19 And consequently, resources now are at least an order of magnitude larger. Also looking at this old report from the Newfoundland Geologic Survey, even back in 2005, we recognized gold in 3 types of very different mineral deposits in Newfoundland. There are first what are called seafloor VMS deposits. These are base metal deposits that formed at the same time the rocks formed. And besides base metals, they have significant precious metal credits also. And historically, Some of these have been mined at relatively moderate scale in Newfoundland.
1:03:05 And many of these occur in the same general rocks or terrains that have the orogenic gold deposits. Epithermal gold deposits are deposits related to granites that form at shallow levels. Normally, you don't find these in metamorphic terrains, such as Newfoundland. But Hope Brook is the one example in Newfoundland of an epithermal deposit. And in the 1980s and 1990s, more than a million ounces of gold was taken from the Hope Brook deposit here. Basically, Hope Brook floated in from across the ocean and we then erode the shallow levels of the crust that have this epithermal deposit.
1:03:52 But for the most part, you would not expect these type of deposits to be abundant in Newfoundland. The type of deposits that are abundant in Newfoundland that are down the center of the island, which is called the Dunnage Zone, coming from the Bay of Verte Peninsula all the way to the Dog Bay Line where Newfound Gold has its recent high-grade intercepts and many other companies are looking, are orogenic-type gold deposits. Valentine Lake is an orogenic gold type deposit. The historic mines such as Pine Cove are orogenic gold deposits, et cetera. So that is really what is the deposit type that is leading to this present-day gold rush that we see in Newfoundland and that has 25, 30 or more companies excited about what they're finding and I think makes Newfoundland as prospective as it is.
1:04:52 So first, what are orogenic coal deposits? Basically they're just gold deposits in metamorphic rocks. They tend to be in medium grade metamorphic rocks, which are often called greenchest facies. Most of these type deposits are steep fault fill veins or coeval extensional type veins, which form at the same time due to changing fluid dynamics. Generally, historically, these will be high-grade type gold deposits, 2, 3, 4, 5 grams per ton. Globally, as we can mine lower-grade, higher-tonnage deposits, many of these that are mined around the world now are less than a gram per ton. Here on the lower right, this is Moro de Oro, the biggest gold deposit in Brazil.
1:05:41 It's an orogenic gold deposit, and it's 20 million ounces at 0.4 grams per ton. So we are mining these at very low grades these days. Really in simple thinking, there's 2 ways to form gold deposits on a planet. You can bring a granite up to shallow levels and either release fluid from the top of the granite or circulate surface waters. And then you can form porphyry deposits that have copper and gold at the top of the porphyries at maybe 3 kilometers depth. Or in the upper 1, 2 kilometers, you can form what are called epithermal type deposits, such as Hope Brook. That's one way we form gold deposits from magmatic or circulating meteoric waters.
1:06:27 The second way we form most gold deposits on the planet, and this is the way we form orogenical deposits, as you bury rocks in the earth from the surface to depth, sedimentary and volcanic rocks change to metamorphic rocks. When you metamorphose a rock, 3 to 4% of that rock volume will change the fluid. That fluid will move into major faults. During earthquakes, the fluid may move up 500 meters or a kilometer and form your orogenic gold deposits. And these are the deposit types that we see along the faults in the center of Newfoundland that are the deposits that are the all the new discoveries that we're seeing today.
1:07:17 When we look globally and ignoring the exceptional historic paleoplasts of South Africa and West Water Strand, about 50 percent or about half the world's gold deposits are like Newfoundland, they're orogenic gold, their gold deposits formed during metamorphism, And the other half of the world's gold is mostly magmatic or intrusion-related gold, such as porphyry, epithermal, and gold-bearing scarn deposits. But this is the target type that we're seeing in Newfoundland. The orogenic gold deposits form as you have subduction. Terrains are accreted to the margin of continents. And between the terrains as they accrete, or get added to the continents, in these sedimentary rocks, We form orogenic gold deposits along the faults that can form to depths of 20 kilometers.
1:08:12 This is different than epithermal and porphyry deposits that form at very shallow levels. So you can see without any amount of erosion, porphyry and epithermal deposits are quickly lost from the geologic record, while orogenic gold deposits, because they form deeper at 5, 10 kilometers, are better preserved back through geologic time, hundreds of millions of years, which is the age of many of the Newfoundland deposits. So if we look at gold endowment versus geologic time, we can see most porphyry and epithermal deposits are 50 or 100 million years old, and that's where the gold endowment sits in these intrusion-related deposits. There are a few that go back into the Paleozoic, very few into the Precambrian.
1:08:58 But when we look at orogenic gold, it's distributed through geologic time all the way back into the Archean. So when we look at Newfoundland, and we'll talk about this in a few minutes, and gold deposits that formed 4 to 500 million years ago, we're talking about orogenic gold deposits. These form in sedimentary rocks because those are the rocks that are added to the edges of continents and metamorphosed and there are many world-class provinces of these such as California mother load, Eastern Russia, Victoria Australia, Otago New Zealand, the Great Belts of Central Asia, etc. And Newfoundland has a potential to be one of these world-class gold provinces in sedimentary type rocks.
1:09:47 They do show a spatial association with seafloor massive sulfide deposits and I'll explain why that may be important in a little bit. But you should know that seafloor deposits form in the middle of the ocean as the plates move to the edge of the continent we start having deformation and metamorphism, deformation and metamorphism, these VMS, massive sulfide deposits such as we have some in New Finland I mentioned, have gold, also get deformed and metamorphosed in these growing continental margins. That's why there's a spatial association of seafloor massive sulfides and orogenic gold deposits. The 2 types form in different settings at different times, but they spatially overlap.
1:10:36 Same with granites. There is a spatial overlap between granites and gold, but there is no genetic association. But Granites are important, as I'll get to in a little bit, because they're good receptacles for gold. They're good host rocks. And you see this in places such as Valentine Lake, where Valentine Lake may be 430 million years old, but the 150-million-year-old intrusion there is a great host rock and those are host rocks you may want to look for in geophysics in your covered terrain. When we look for orogenic gold deposits in Newfoundland or anywhere in the world, there are 3 keys for exploration. Looking at structure, metamorphism and traps.
1:11:25 You need large structures to focus a lot of fluid, such as If we look at the great Abitibi gold province of central Canada and Ontario and Quebec, these are your first order faults, which bound blocks that have collided. The orogenic gold deposits sit along second and third order faults a few kilometers to maybe 10 kilometers adjacent to these major faults. But you need to have large faults to have large deposits. If you don't have large faults the fluids will go everywhere. You may have a lot of tonnage but they'll be all low-grade deposits. If you have large faults, the fluids are focused, and you may have your Abitibi or Newfoundland-style gold.
1:12:11 Along these faults, and we see this at Wilding Lake and Valentine Lake, we want to look for jogs or bends. This is the Great Fault in Western Australia that hosts the famous Golden Mile deposit. It strikes 155 to 165 degrees, but you can see the Golden Mile and the other deposits sit where there's a 10-20 degrees change in strike along that fault. That focus is fluid and then the fluid can go off in the second and third order faults and regional folds and form your gold deposits. So you want to look along these major structures in Newfoundland and everywhere else for changes and strikes along the fault and you form these fault fill veins, extensional veins, which we see in these orogenical deposits in Newfoundland and everywhere in the world.
1:13:02 And we want to look along contacts we see this very commonly in all the Newfoundland occurrences if you have a intrusion and if you have sediments we want to look along the contact because that's where you'll have your secondary faults, and that's where the fluids will flow. And especially when you have structural complexities, complex geometry, you're going to form your ore bodies along the contacts. Here's another example from some work by workers in West Africa. Here you can see phyllite on one side. You can see volcanic rocks on the other. And the shear that develops between these lithologies is where a lot of the minimalization is going to be concentrated. And you have that in Newfoundland again. It's no exception.
1:13:49 Where these major faults intersect regional fault systems, anticlines, fluids can move up the limbs of the anticline, form gold along the limbs of the anticline, or on top of the anticlines, where you have major faults develop along the axis of these fault systems. Laguna and Nova Scotia is very famous for these, although small, small scale. Victoria and Australia is very famous for these at large scale. And I think Newfoundland between many of the faults we see many of these same type of anticlinal fold systems making it very prospective for orogenic gold. Besides structure the next thing that's important is metamorphism.
1:14:35 Orogenic gold deposits sit in medium-grade metamorphic rocks, mostly greenchist faces, and most of the gold occurrences in Newfoundland sit in greenchist faces. Why? Because as you metamorphose a rock between greenchist and amphibolite facies, again that's what 3 to 4 percent of the rock volume changes the fluid and that fluid carries sulfur and gold and forms your orogenic gold deposits. Orogenic gold is basically a regional metamorphic fluid. It's a product of metamorphism. If you metamorphose the rock, you're always gonna create a gold-bearing fluid that's gonna form gold. And we can look anywhere in the world. We can look at Western Australia. We can look at the Abitibi and you notice how most of the gold endowment sits in these medium grade metamorphic rocks.
1:15:26 Those are what you tend to target. So you want to look at structure. You want to look at metamorphism and then we want to look at competency contrasts which would be our physical tracks. If you have a competent rock like say a granite sitting in a less competent rock such as a shale or an argillite, the granite fractures more easily open space along these major structures and that's where your fluid is going to flow. For example, this is the Alaska Juno mine where I worked for many years. This is a large intrusive body. You can see the miner or at it here for scale And you can see how 95% of the mineralization in these quartz veins sits in this intrusive body and not in the more ductile sediments adjacent to it. That doesn't mean there's a genetic association.
1:16:16 This intrusion is 150 milliliters older than the gold, but it's something to explore for because it's competent and it soaks up that gold bearing fluid because it fractures more easily. That's what we mean by physical traps. There are also chemical traps, the great 40 million ounce home state deposit in South Dakota is an example of that. You can see these different rock formations, but you can see how all the 40 million ounces of gold sit in this one thin formation called home state. Why? Fluids move up structures. When they hit this home stake formation, it's a banded iron formation, lots of iron. The sulfur that carries the gold in the fluids reacts with the iron. You form pyrite and arsenopyrite, and the gold that's moving with the sulfur drops out of solution.
1:17:05 That's what we call a chemical trap. And many of the gold occurrences in Newfoundland are associated with iron-rich rocks, like iron-rich gabbros, that are good chemical traps. So we have good physical and chemical traps for orogenic gold and Newfoundland has both of these types of traps. We see differences in deformation styles. We can see very ductile crack seal type veins. We can see very brittle breccia or stockwork type veins. We see all these in most orogenic coal provinces and Newfoundland is no different than the rest. Often people refer to shallow epizonal type orogenic gold deposits in Newfoundland comparing it to Fosterville, Australia.
1:17:52 But some of their mineralization isn't as brittle as Fosterville and some would be mesozonal and slightly deeper, some of the Newfoundland mineralization. When you get very deep, its rocks are very ductile. You're gonna have lots of replacement style mineralization and you see some of this in Newfoundland, but you're not gonna have big quartz veins when the rocks are not brittle. When you get very shallow, the orogenic gold deposits only form from 3 to 20 kilometers. In the upper few kilometers where there's no granites, the geothermal gradient's low. So you don't carry gold to shallow levels. But at 200 degrees, you may deposit massive stibnite. You get very shallow you get cinnabar. Some of these stibnite occurrences that we see in Newfoundland could be the tops to orogenic gold deposits.
1:18:42 Donlon Creek in Alaska, which is a large gold tonnage deposit, is a good example of that. And could some of these in Newfoundland be Donlon Creek type occurrences? So now, well, before I get to Newfoundland, one last slide. Tectonically, what we see in Newfoundland is so similar to so many of these productive orogenic gold provinces worldwide. Just for example, take Eastern Russia. Here we have the continent. Here we have a series of arks that collided. Here we have a back ark area with marine sediments with a whole series of fault systems, and orogenic gold deposits sitting along all of these. Some of these are alluvial, some of these are load, but together there's more than 100 billion ounces of gold in here. This is the same kind of tectonic setting we see in the Cordillera of western North America, and it's what we saw in Newfoundland 500 to 400 million years ago. So now let's look at Newfoundland quickly and look at the gold and see how it fits the orogenic model.
1:19:49 The Newfoundland grew basically from terrains that collided with the continent of North America between about 500 and 400 million years ago. And the orogenic gold is concentrated in this what's called gunnage zone. There's a whole series of rocks here called the Niltredame subterrane or zone, which are including a bunch, you include a bunch of rocks that moved along the margin from the north and sort of came along this fault line here and were accreted beginning 490,480 million years. Then we have a couple of more outboard terrains that actually came along these faults and collided and they came from Gondwana on the other side of the planet and they all collided here between 500 and 400 million years ago and it's during these last collisions at about 400 million years when most of the gold formed along these faults at about 430 to 400 million years.
1:20:56 So this is the area where the gold formed and we also formed during this collision lots of other secondary faults such as the Victoria Lake shear zone that has the Valentine Lake deposit and Wilding Lake prospect. Just 1 or 2 quick slides to show you what happened. These are the terrains that make up the eastern part of Newfoundland. They moved from Gondwana here on the other side of the planet over 150,200 million years and collided with North America and collided with North America to eventually form Newfoundland. The whole Brook epithermal deposit in Newfoundland that I talked about earlier actually was part of these terrains and migrated with these terrains across the ocean. It formed before Newfoundland formed.
1:21:51 Eventually, these terrains became part of North America and here in Newfoundland and down to Nova Scotia. And then all the way through the eastern US we formed orogenic gold deposits and later collisions form these same deposits in Northwest Europe in the French Massif and the Bohemian Massif of the Czech Republic. So it was this growth of Pangaea and terrains, oceanic terrains, being metamorphosed in here that formed a whole series of great orogenic gold deposits. Just briefly, many of these deposits in the United States were mined prior to the Civil War. But once the Civil War started, as well as gold being discovered out in California and then in Alaska and Yukon, all the great prospectors left. And the gold deposits here all seem to be small. They don't have great major structures.
1:22:49 Same when we look at Magoomer here in Nova Scotia. There's a lot of high-grade, really nice-looking gold deposits, but they don't have the false systems that you have up here in Newfoundland. And along all these false systems in Newfoundland, we're starting to recognize potential for significant gold. And actually, these, this terrain, the Notre Dame zone here in this part of Newfoundland, can be traced up to the British Isles. And similar deposits have been recently put into development in Northern Ireland and Southern Scotland. But here's what we have when we look at this map from Sandman in 2017 in Newfoundland, this whole central belt is characterized.
1:23:38 Here's the more historic orogenic gold deposits of the Bay of Verte Peninsula. Here's some of the large fault systems and secondary fault systems in the middle of the Dunnage zone including the Valentine Lake shear zone and we can look at these fault systems all the way over to the Dog Bay line. This is the same scenario we see in the Kodi Arab North America, Western North America, that we see in the Russian Far East, now we see in Victoria, Australia. And the potential is huge. I think understanding prospectivity between the different fault systems is going to be important. It's taken a long time to recognize this because cover, glacial cover, is quite extensive here in central Newfoundland, but certainly what we're seeing now makes the Dunnage Zone world-class perspective.
1:24:33 As I mentioned, historically, the Bay of Varaday Peninsula has been the area where most of the work has gone on in the 1980s and 1990s. Anaconda up here at Pine Cove and some of the adjacent properties has been mining about 15,000 ounces of gold over the last 10-12 years. Both replacement style and fault type mineralization. A lot of mineralization is along contacts between different units, what you would expect for orogenic type gold. And there's a couple of fault systems here that are very permissive. So far, Most of these are high grade but low tonnage, but at the price of gold today, a few high grade deposits next to each other are good things.
1:25:24 The exploit subzone in the central and moving over to the eastern side of the Dunnage Zone here is really the area that's attracted a lot of attention. I've been involved with C2C recently, but certainly many other companies along here have had great success already, such as Marathon's Valentine lake with more than 4 million ounces, et cetera. These all reflect closures of these ocean rocks as terrains were created. These represent rocks that were collided and closed, and we had reverse faults and shearing up till about 400 million years, 430 million years, and then there was also some sprike slip motion on these and that's perhaps when some of the gold came in. We're looking at major fluid conduits, structural complexity, regional fold systems, and that's where we're going to find good orogenic type gold deposits. We can look at Marathon's Valentine Lake.
1:26:29 We can see interesting jogs along here. Again, that's where you're going to focus fluid. We have different lithologies here. We have lithological contacts, and that's where the gold is. That is critical and I mentioned earlier VMS deposits sea floor massive sulfide deposits When we want to metamorphose a package of rocks and there's a lot of seafloor sulfide in there, there's going to be a lot of sin sedimentary pyrite with high background gold. So it's a bonus when you metamorphose rocks that have VMS deposits. That's why maybe the abativity is so rich. That's why maybe we're finding Egypt, Eritrea, Sudan. That region of East Africa now is becoming recognized as a very gold-rich area. It is a bonus to have earlier massive sulfide deposits as part of the package being metamorphosed.
1:27:23 We can look at these slides from Marathon Gold. Again, the host rock is a competent granite. It's not a genetic association. But looking for these different lithologies that are good traps are critical for finding these quartz-tomaline pyrite veins, such as we see at Marathon. Some people, the tellurides at Valentine Lake, people like to say, oh, tellurides, it must be related to intrusion. That's not necessarily true. Many of the world's great orogenic gold deposits have significant tellurides. In fact, tellurides are recovered from the Orica Kensington deposit in Alaska that has most of the gold tied up in tellurides. The Golden Mile in Western Australia has significant gold there in tellurides, so it's not necessarily related to granite. So we look here, You can see the main shear zone on one of the Valentine Lake properties. And you can see how the mineralization sits in the hanging wall intrusion.
1:28:24 It's a very favorable, competent rock. Another thing that I find very exciting, This is from some of C2C's work that Sean Ryan, who you heard one of the previous days, talk about. Glacial till. This area is undercover, but the till anomalies throughout this part of Newfoundland and over to the east along the Dog Bay line are very extensive and they suggest on the fault systems between these 2 regional fault systems, the Red Indian line and the Victoria Lake shear zone, significant gold potential along the complex structural geology here, which is if we look at, you can see from this slide from Sandman in 2014, the Jocelyn zone occurrence. We're looking at anticlinal structures.
1:29:18 The Jocelyn zone actually sits in these turbidites below sort of a black shale seal type rock right above it. But what's exciting is all these till anomalies sit where you have these regional fault systems. And so not just right adjacent to the faults, but these fault systems associated with the faults are certainly exciting targets here in this part of central Newfoundland. A lot of the rocks are bleached and they're spotted, which are distal guides to looking for orogenic gold deposits. A lot of these show early albite alteration. Steve Pearcy and some of his students working in Newfoundland from Memorial University talk about that.
1:30:03 You albatyze a rock, you make it more brittle, it fractures more easily, widespread albite alteration that we see in here is critical. So there are so many exciting features here that you would expect to find in a large gold camp. And now we can move far to the east and this is where the exciting newfound gold Queensway project sits and many other companies are working now along the Dog Bay line and rub line sort of suture zone and secondary faults along here have significant gold and till anomalies. A lot of results are very exciting and we may have 3 or 4 zones here that have the potential to have serious world-class gold systems and this would look then very similar to what we see in Victoria, Australia.
1:30:54 One thing that sticks out to me about this area of newfound gold, it's on the margin of this large bafflet which is slightly older than the gold occurrences that are being found in the drilling. The margins to batholiths give you sort of a structural regime where you have different stresses and very favorable areas to find orogenic gold. You can see this in orogenic gold all the way back to Barbotin in southern Africa at 3.2 billion years ago. The margins of these large batholiths in the adjacent sediments, very good for explorationists. So to summarize, why I'm excited about Newfoundland, why the company I'm involved with is excited about Newfoundland, C2 Gold, C2C Gold, and why many of you and many of the companies that are there are there now it seems to have all the right ingredients it has favorable source rocks you've metamorphosed oceanic sediments and oceanic sediments that have pre metamorphic VMS deposits to add even more gold and sulfur into the mix. It has an exceptional conduit system of major terrain boundary sutures, second and third order shears off these, and a great regional fall system.
1:32:19 And it has the complexity and lithology to have favorable traps. And a few things about orogenic gold that stick out. First off, if we look at these worldwide, so far 1 giant deposit's been found here and that is the Valentine Lake area properties. But there's never just 1 orogenic gold deposit in a province, whether you're talking about Victoria, California mother load, Central Asia, from Murrentau all the way to Compton. You're gonna find lots and lots of these. They occur together in provinces. So we would expect many million ounce deposits in an area like this. Second, we're looking undercover. So we're just beginning to explore and find these kind of deposits in a green fields area, which is New Finland. Historically, prospectors would find the largest deposit first And that would be then other favorable deposits would be smaller but the same type. However, we're looking undercover.
1:33:29 There's a large glacial till covering here. So the largest first rule may not apply here. It may not be Valentine Lake. Using new tools of geochemistry and especially geophysics and creative thinking in our drilling, we might find many other deposits and some could be bigger than Valentine Lake. I can look at say Kinros's Taziest in Mauritania. That's the first one found again undercover, but it may not be the largest. So as we move our exploration under cover, the rule of largest first may not hold. And could this be the 100 million ounce province that we have in this Paleozoic gold belt that really stretches from Alabama to southern Scotland, it certainly geologically has the best ingredients to form what would be a Victoria, Australia style or Eastern Russia style or a genetic type gold province that has been hidden under glacial cover for a long time and is now being recognized.
1:34:41 That's why I'm so excited about Newfoundland. So anyway, Thanks for listening and certainly I'm glad always to accept questions over email or anything else. So thanks a lot everybody. Bye-bye. You
