New Round Of Drilling At Zacatecas Project
Defiance Silver Corp. (TSXV: DEF) (OTCQX: DNCVF) is preparing to commence a drill campaign on the regional exploration targets at Lucita on the company’s Zacatecas project in Mexico.
Drilling is scheduled to commence on or around October 10th and will initially be focused at Lucita South, which includes the Palenque, El Puerto, and the Tahuares vein structures.
Lucita Overview
The Lucita project is under option from Pan American Silver. It includes two licence areas – North and South – and contains numerous drill-ready exploration targets over a large (>20 sq. km) project area.
The Lucita North license area encompasses the Panuco vein system. The Panuco system is being drilled by nearby operator Zacatecas Silver Corp. on its portion of the Panuco vein system, located west of Defiance’s licence area; Zacatecas Silver has recently published an historic Inferred 43-101 resource estimate for their portion of the Panuco vein system. That resource estimate is on strike with historical high-grade drilling done by Pan American within Defiance Silver’s optioned tenure area.
Pan American has previously drilled a number of holes in the Panuco area and returned encouraging results. At Panuco, there remain a number of undrilled vein targets marked by outcropping veins, stockworks, and breccias with historical shafts and underground workings.
The southern portion of the Lucita land package contains the multi-kilometre Palenque vein system, which is undrilled and remains a high-priority exploration target. Defiance Silver intends to test the Palenque structure with a series of drill holes. Other targets in the area include the El Puerto target, also under option from Pan American Silver, as well as the Tahuares Vein target, which lies within the San Acacio licenses.
Lucita Geologic Overview and Resource Potential
The Lucita project is characterised as a low to intermediate sulphidation Ag-Au vein, breccia, and stockwork system with historical high-grade drill results and drill-ready exploration targets. There are at least 10 known mineralised structures over a vein strike length of approximately 20 km, including the drilled on-strike extension of the Panuco Deposit currently being drilled by Zacatecas Silver Corp.
The veins in the northern license area have a continuous length of 4km and have widths from 0.20m to 4m. Historical drilling of these veins from 20 holes completed by Pan American in 2011-2012 returned encouraging results including 3.35m of 325 g/t Ag from hole LU11-16 and 1.25m of 775 g/t Ag from drill hole LU11-9.
Pan American has carried out geological mapping, sampling, and two drilling campaigns in the northern “Panuco” license area. Phase I drilling in 1996 comprised 10 holes and 1,409.85 metres of drilling. Phase II drilling was carried out in late 2011 and early 2012, comprising 20 drill holes with 3,693.41 metres drilled. Both drill campaigns intersected mineralised veining typical of a high-level epithermal system.
Panuco hosts a historic Inferred mineral resource estimate of 3,954,729 tonnes at 153 g/t AgEq based on a 100 g/t AgEq for 19,472,901 Ag Eq ounces.
Exploration Programme Next Steps
- Continued drilling in the main resource area at the San Acacio mine designed to test the limits of the vein system to update the resource estimate.
- Having received a positive response from the necessary authorities, the commencement in early October of initial drilling at the Lucita project.
- Additional district-scale surface exploration, including ongoing mapping and sampling at the Lucita and Veta Grande Sur, which is underway.
- Ongoing core re-logging of the historical drill holes.
For further information please visit: https://www.defiancesilver.com/
