North of 60 Mining News - The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North

Aura Silver Resources Inc. May 3 reported that Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd will continue to carry out exploration at Aura's Greyhound gold property this year.

Situated 32 kilometers (20 miles) south of Agnico Eagle's Meadowbank gold mine in Nunavut, Greyhound hosts gold-rich zones and base metals-rich volcanogenic massive sulfide targets.

Agnico earned an initial 51 percent interest in a portion of Greyhound upon completing a 2017 spring drilling program, a stake that can be increased to 70 percent with additional spending.

Agnico Eagle, the operating manager of the property, will undertake surface mapping, induced polarization (IP) geophysical surveys, till sampling and drilling on newly defined targets this year.

This work will focus primarily on gold targets at two distinct areas around Aura Lake.

The first target is a gold-rich system that extends for about 9,000 meters along the western margin of an intrusive complex that forms the base of the greenstone belt.

Aura said this area, which may represent a major thrust fault, contains several gold and copper-enriched zones, including historical copper-rich veins in its northwestern area and numerous gold zones southeast of Aura Lake, where surface samples have returned up to 28 grams per metric ton gold.

Aura said till (glacial sediment) samples collected in the area where rock samples have returned high-grade gold indicate an extensive arsenic and gold enriched anomalous zone extending to the southwest.

Additional soil sampling in 2018 will better define this anomalous target area. The fault system bounding the east side of the intrusion will also be examined for its gold prospectivity, including additional IP geophysical work and soil sampling across these fault systems.

The second set of gold targets is associated with an iron formation that forms the cap to the greenstone belt in the Greyhound area.

Numerous samples returning more than 5 g/t gold have been previously collected along the 10-kilometer- (six miles) length of this iron formation to the southwest of Aura Lake.

This year's exploration will look for similar mineralization in the northwest part of the property.

Based on the results of the additional soil sampling, prospecting and IP surveys, a focused drill program to test any newly defined anomalous targets is expected.

The Baker Lake-Meadowbank all-weather road extends through the center of the Greyhound property, which makes current exploration cost efficient and would provide excellent access to the Meadowbank Mine complex should a deposit be found.

–SHANE LASLEY