A fatter wallet will make a big difference to junior explorer
Founded in 1994, Odyssey went public in an initial public offering early in 1999. Its corporate bent is for early-stage projects in the southern and eastern Mediterranean, where comparatively few Canadian junior explorers have gone looking in the past. Currently, the company has properties in Turkey, Yemen and Morocco.
A recent financing is at last giving Odyssey an opportunity to put that philosophy into practice: up to 5.8 million special warrants are being offered for net proceeds of $1.2 million. About $400,000 has been raised so far.
Most of the money is to be spent on projects in Turkey, where Odyssey has assembled a stable of grassroots exploration plays around showings of both gold and base metals. Odyssey’s Turkish interests are held through its 90%-held local subsidiary, Yildiz Arama Ve Madencilik, in which three Turkish businessmen share a 10% interest.
The project that has been waiting for the biggest slice of the funds is in Turkey’s Eastern Pontide volcanic belt, south of the Black Sea. Odyssey assembled its Lucky Star land package through purchase and option agreements with existing land holders and through some staking of its own.
Lucky Star sits in a folded sequence of andesites, trachy-andesites and volcanic-derived sediments. The prospect was discovered in the 1980s in a survey by the MTA, the Turkish mines ministry’s development agency. MTA had done some mapping and trenching, and run an induced-polarization (IP) survey in the area, before drilling 17 holes to assess the IP anomalies.
One hole intersected 11.2 metres grading 24.6% zinc and 8.5% lead, but, curiously, MTA never followed up on the technical success. Odyssey subsequently resampled the MTA core and found 15.25 metres graded an average of 21.7% zinc, 5.7% lead and 101 grams silver per tonne. The mineralized zone is open to depth and along strike.
The meat of the mineralization is pyrite, sphalerite and galena, but the accessory minerals are not the typical massive-sulphide suite. Instead, Lucky Star’s stibnite, realgar, orpiment, and native sulphur are suggestive of high-sulphidation deposits. So also is the argillic (clay-mineral) alteration, pyritization, and silicification.
The company has slated stream-sediment sampling and geophysical surveys for the property, and will be filling in MTA’s reconnaissance mapping and doing detailed mapping over the prospect itself. That work is expected to bring the project to the drilling stage.
Odyssey’s other property in eastern Turkey, Esendal, also got some attention from the MTA in the 1980s. The copper-gold prospect, near the Black Sea and the Georgian border in Artvin province, was subjected to two MTA drill holes that followed up on earlier geochemical work.
At Esendal, younger granites intrude a sequence of volcanic rocks, mainly of intermediate-to-felsic composition. Along the contact between the granite and the country rocks, a 1-km corridor of silicified rocks with disseminated pyrite hosts copper, gold, zinc, lead and molybdenum mineralization. Both granite and volcanics can be mineralized.
Odyssey’s own surface sampling in the area returned elevated gold and copper values, and a set of four chip samples ran an average of 6.7 grams gold per tonne and 0.54% copper over a true width estimated at 20 metres.
Odyssey’s immediate plans for Esendal are less ambitious than those for Lucky Star, but the company still intends to map, sample and trench the area around the main showing.
Across the country, in Kirklareli province near the Bulgarian border, Odyssey is exploring the Camurlutepe property. The area is known for its copper and molybdenum showings, and the MTA did some reconnaissance-scale soil geochemistry there in the 1970s. It found a zone of apparent copper enrichment, but there was no follow-up at the time.
One of Odyssey’s Turkish partners, geologist Omer Celenk, discovered a gold showing in a roadcut at Camurlutepe in 1997, where a 10-metre chip sample ran 8 grams gold per tonne. Subsequent soil surveys traced out a zone of soils 700 metres long, with gold values of between 40 and 80 parts per billion.
Held in a zone of hydrothermal alteration about 1 km long and 10-50 metres wide, the mineralization includes veinlets, stockworks and silicified masses in phyllite and andesite. The alteration, which affects both rock types along a volcanic contact, takes the form of silicification immediately around the showings, argillization farther out, and development of sericite and pyrite on the fringes of the alteration zone.
Most of the mineralization in the Camurlutepe area occurs near a series of intermediate-to-felsic intrusions (all late Cretaceous in age) that form a 30-km belt in Turkey and across the border in Bulgaria. The principal Turkish specimen is the Demirkoy porphyry copper deposit, which has a 220-million-tonne resource grading 0.27% copper. A skarn deposit on the Bulgarian side of the border has no published resource estimate but nonetheless has been in production for about 40 years.
Once a budget is in place, Odyssey plans to expand the soil survey and trench and sample along the zone defined by the earlier soil sampling. This should allow the company to pick some suitable targets for drilling at a later date.
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