Carpathian gears up for drilling in Romania

Vancouver — Recent reconnaissance mapping and sampling by Carpathian Gold (CPN-V) have outlined numerous drill targets along a large copper-gold soil anomaly at the company’s Oravita exploration licence in southwestern Romania.

The Toronto-based company plans to carry out a drill program of at least 3,000 metres to test the 3.5-km-long Talva Trend anomaly, which covers historic workings and dumps within a 1,500-metre portion of the trend.

Among the high-priority targets is Talva Mica, a prominent hill previously explored and partially developed by a state geological agency. Carpathian’s sampling here returned encouraging copper-gold assays from 26 of 52 grab samples. Copper values ranged from 0.4% to 4.2%, while gold values ranged from 0.11 gram to 4.41 grams per tonne.

Copper mineralization at Talva Mica is hosted in inter-bedded hornfels and calc-silicate skarn, whereas 500 metres to the northeast, copper and gold mineralization is hosted in altered quartz-diorite porphyry and hornfels.

The presence of surface mineralization at Talva Mica is viewed as “highly encouraging” as it occurs 100-to-300 metres above a high-grade copper zone defined by state geologists in the 1990s.

The underground Talva Mica zone is described as 50 to 70 metres wide, 300 metres long, and is open along strike. While government-collected samples were not assayed for gold, reported assays from past work include 12 metres of 2.76% copper, 10 metres of 5.1% copper, 7 metres of 1.17% copper, and 2 metres of 7.87% copper plus 0.2% molybdenum.

Carpathian’s recent sampling program has shown that the copper-gold mineralization occurs along strike both to the northeast and southwest of the Talva Mica zone over a distance of 1,200 metres.

Carpathian also plans to drill up to 3,000 metres at its Carbunari-Stinapari prospect, 25 km south of the Oravita licence. The target here is sediment-hosted, disseminated, “Carlin-style” gold deposits.

A field program of mapping, sampling and geophysics is under way to define targets for the summer drill program. Work is focused on a 3.5-km-long belt of gold-bearing jasperoid occurrences that have returned values ranging from 1 to 15.1 grams gold per tonne, and a gold-in-soil anomaly within folded limestone and calcareous siliclastic sediments.