Seabridge Gold Inc. July 18 announced the start of its first full drill program at the company's 3 Aces gold project in Yukon, Canada, which aims to complete 7,500 meters of drilling.

Lying alongside the Nahanni Range Road, 3 Aces is a road-accessible project that covers 357 square kilometers (138 square miles) of high-grade gold discoveries and targets in southeastern Yukon.

After acquiring the project in 2020, Seabridge has been refining its model and geological understanding to better approach this highly prospective land package that has been compared with some of the largest and richest gold deposits in the world, including the California Mother Lode Belt, the Juneau Gold Belt, the Muruntau in Uzbekistan, and Obuasi in Ghana.

Historical work has identified a broad area of gold-in-soil anomalies extending more than 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) along strike, and drilling has identified several gold-rich zones in the Central Core area of the property.

Of the 300 holes drilled at 3 Aces prior to Seabridge's acquisition, 37% cut grades exceeding 5 grams per metric ton gold, with 27% returning more than 8 g/t gold. Many of these holes were close-space off-sets on high-grade veins that come to the surface, but all veins identified in the Central Core Area have encountered high-grade intersections.

For its 2023 drilling program, the company has set its sights on this very Central Core Area, with initial drilling focusing on expanding the mineralized zones on the Hearts and Spades targets.

"We are looking forward to executing our first full program at 3 Aces," said Seabridge Gold CEO Rudi Fronk. "Our team has been refining our new model and checking its concepts against field observations. They believe this model will provide the basis to integrate past and current drill results into meaningful zones of mineralization."

With this new model, Seabridge is testing four zones – Spades, Hearts, Hearts West, and Clubs – that have shown consistently better gold values due to second-generation folding and so evaluations of the target areas will include:

• The gold mineralization in historical drill holes that have not been pursued down plunge of the folds.

• Untested synform-antiform pairs in the folds, identified within the extensive gold-in-soil anomaly of the Central Core Area.

• Interaction between structurally prepared rocks of the earlier generation of folding and the mineralizing second generation.

Essentially, 3 Aces stratigraphy or rock layers have created an ideal trap for gold-bearing fluids to become stuck within quartz veins.

Scheduled to complete 7,500 meters of core and reverse circulation drilling in the Central Core Area, the company expects this program to help them prioritize mineralized zones and take steps closer to delineating resources, Fronk added.

Seabridge Gold Inc.

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"We are proud of our exploration record and we are now gunning for our next round of exploration successes at our 3 Aces and Iskut projects," he said. "The preparatory work has been done. At 3 Aces, we are looking for the continuity that eluded previous operators and which is needed for resource delineation."