GEM: The Feds’ New Fund For Arctic Exploration

In its 2008 budget, the Canadian government described a “Vision for a New North” which included spending $34 million over two years on a program called “Geo-mapping for Energy and Minerals,” or GEM.

This program has been designed to provide public geoscience information across the north to help guide private-sector investment decisions leading to the discovery and development of new energy and mineral resources, and tangible benefits for Northerners.

In August 2008, things were stepped up a few notches, with GEM being boosted to a $100-million program over five years (2008- 2013). Funding is due to ramp up to $30 million in 2009-10 from $12 million for 2008-09.

Natural Resources Canada’s Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) will lead the federal government’s contributions to GEM in collaboration with provincial and territorial government geoscience agencies, as well as with academic researchers and their students from across Canada.

At least 75% of federal GEM funds will be allocated for public geoscience in the three territories, where the need for new geological mapping is particularly acute. For example, adequate geological knowledge to support resource exploration exists for only about one-third of Nunavut.

In the provinces, eligible work will be done on a cost-shared basis with provincial agencies.

Work under the GEM program is already under way with seven airborne geophysical surveys having been completed across Canada.

Minerals-related GEM projects will target specific commodities with significant exploration potential and cover areas of uncertain or open mineral potential.

One GEM project dedicated to supporting diamond exploration will focus on four geographic areas: a corridor between Rankin Inlet and northern Baffin Island, along the west coast of Hudson Bay; the northwestern extent of the Slave Craton; the Akaitcho area south of the East Arm of Great Slave Lake; and the proposed diamond corridor through southern Alberta and Saskatchewan.

This diamond-related work will include teleseismic and magnetotelluric surveys, regional- scale surficial mapping, indicator minerals and targeted dispersal studies, xenolith-based studies of lithospheric age-depth structure, as well as thematic studies of global diamond events and the classical cold craton model for diamond potential.

Several GEM projects will be dedicated to supporting exploration for a variety of other commodities, including precious metals. These range from: the cross-border EDGES project in southwestern Yukon and northern B. C. that will investigate the currently uncertain volcanogenic massive sulphide, copper-molybdenum and gold potential at the edge of ancestral North America; the Great Bear magmatic zone, including framework geological mapping, the collection of modern airborne magnetic and radiometric data, and an assessment of iron ore-copper-gold potential; the Melville peninsula, where work will focus on new models for the origin, evolution and glacial history of Archean and Proterozoic supracrustal belts; the Cumberland peninsula on Baffin Island, which contains the largest poorly known volume of sedimentary and volcanic rocks in the eastern Arctic, inherently potentially attractive to the metal exploration sector; northernmost Manitoba’s Great Island -Seal River area, with its potential for gold, base metals, uranium, platinum group metals (PGM), rare elements and diamonds; and the Schefferville area straddling the Quebec- Labrador border in support of nickel-PGM and uranium exploration.

Other gold-related projects are planned. The first focus will be on central Nunavut, where there is a developing gold district that lacks a predictive metallogenic model and is populated by apparently diverse and unrelated gold occurrences and deposits. Work may also address potential genetic relationships between the faults, sediments, and gold mineralization in the Slave Craton and points east.

Base metals-related projects will include: helicopter-supported accelerated geological mapping over a large section of the southern part of the Selwyn basin; and investigation of the lead-zinc and magmatic nickel-PGM potential on Victoria Island and the adjacent mainland, including systematic geological mapping in the western Minto inlier.

GEM will also fund more broadly thematic projects, including remote predictive mapping, indicator minerals databases, and mineral potential evaluation methods.

For more information, please visit the GEM website at gsc. nrcan. gc.ca/gem,or contact the head of your territorial or provincial geological survey, or the GSC at the following: John Percival, GEM program manager responsible for minerals ( joperciv@nrcan.gc.ca);Martin Fowler, GEM program manager responsible for energy ( mfowler@nrcan.gc.ca),and Simon Hanmer, GEM coordinator (shanmer@ nrcan. gc.ca).

— The author is a geoscientist with the Geological Survey of Canada in Ottawa, and is coordinator of its Geo-mapping for Energy and Minerals (GEM) program.