Starfield hits high grades at Ferguson Lake

Vancouver — Starfield Resources (SRU-V) cut a narrow, high-grade platinum and palladium horizon on the West zone of the Ferguson Lake deposit, near Rankin Inlet in Nunavut. (The deposit also contains nickel-copper-cobalt mineralization).

Drill hole 101 was collared 200 metres west of hole 89, which, as previously reported, cut 18.9 metres grading 0.83% copper, 0.5% nickel and 0.06% cobalt, plus 2.5 grams palladium and 0.25 gram platinum per tonne. The new hole intersected the West massive sulphide zone about 200 metres lower than did hole 89. Results are pending.

A separate, 0.35-metre-thick zone, 15 metres above the massive sulphides, returned 103 grams palladium and 26.7 grams platinum per tonne at a down-hole depth of 962.3 metres.

“We sampled above and below the horizon and found that it was dead,” says Starfield geologist Robert Krause. “There is a hole updip about 100 metres and another, 200 metres to the east, and the on-site geologists are examining the core in order to identify that horizon.”

He adds that Falconbridge‘s (FL-T) Strathcona deposit, in Sudbury, Ont., had a similar zone (in excess of 1 oz. platinum group elements per tonne) peripheral to its massive sulphides. The marker for the Strathcona horizon was epidote. Starfield reports that barite and biotite are associated with its high-grade platinum-group-metal (PGM) zone.

The new zone is believed to be a separate, subparallel horizon within the overall gabbroic host sill. It may represent a distinct mineralizing event caused by primary differentiation during cooling of the original sill.

“The horizon is displaced from the sulphides, and we may have missed it in previous holes,” says Krause.

Starfield discovered the high-grade PGM mineralization while sampling stringer sulphides just above the narrow horizon. Hole 101 represents Starfield’s deepest and most westerly hole on the West zone.

So far this year, Starfield’s drilling activities have increased the inferred resource at Ferguson Lake to 51.7 million tonnes grading 0.92% copper, 0.58% nickel and 1.44 grams combined platinum and palladium. The estimate is based on a cutoff grade of 1% combined copper and nickel.

At a 1.5% cutoff, the resource weighs in at 25.5 million tonnes grading 1.15% copper, 0.87% nickel and 1.86 grams combined platinum and palladium.

Using a 2% cutoff, the resource is reduced to 9.3 million tonnes averaging 1.37% copper, 0.87% nickel and 2.06 grams combined platinum and palladium.