Partnership To Jointly Acquire Grey River Gold Project
Sokoman Minerals Corp. (TSXV: SIC) (OTCQB: SICNF), together with Benton Resources Inc. have jointly acquired the 324 claim (8,100 hectare) Grey River Gold Project in southern Newfoundland.
The Property includes 11 claim units (275 hectares) optioned from local interests under letter agreements, more details to be released in the coming weeks.
The Grey River acquisition is consistent with the newly formed Sokoman/Benton Alliance, which is targeting district-scale gold opportunities in Newfoundland. Sokoman is now one of the largest land holders in Newfoundland with direct ownership or co-ownership of over 150,000 hectares (+6,000 claims) and is sufficiently funded to advance its portfolio of properties.
The Grey River Gold Project is centred on the community of Grey River, a deep-water, ice-free harbour on the south coast of the Island of Newfoundland, 32 km east of the town of Burgeo, and 38 km southeast of the recently acquired Golden Hope Joint Venture.
The SIC-BEX claims straddle a fundamental east-west trending ductile shear zone that separates a large enclave of Late Precambrian amphibolite, gabbro, metasediments, felsic metavolcanics and mafic orthogneisses from a batholith-scale, syn-kinematic suite of Siluro-Devonian granitoid rocks. The east-west trending amphibolite-grade metamorphic units are correlatives of the coeval basement block exposed on-strike, farther west in the Hermitage Flexure, near Burgeo and at Hope Brook. The east-west shear zone at Grey River, and parallel structures immediately offshore, are fundamental crustal breaks, along which several metal-rich mid- to late-Devonian granites were emplaced along the southern coast of the Island.
Previous exploration at Grey River identified gold in several settings: in base-metal-rich and sulphide-poor, quartz veins and veinlets in the gneisses and related metamorphic rocks, including regional-scale silica bodies; in quartz veins with coarse-grained sulphides in granite; in sulphide-poor, quartz stock-work in sericitized granite; and in stockwork-style quartz and quartz-sulphide veinlets with or without pervasive silica replacement in granite.
Gold grades reported from historic grab samples and channel samples from the property range from less than 1 g/t to over 225 g/t Au, locally with 200-300 g/t Ag, with or without anomalous Bi, Sb (antimony) and W. The 225 g/t Au chip sample is from a 20-30 cm wide zone of pyritic alteration immediately adjacent to an 8-km-long, diffusely bounded quartz zone.
The latter coincides with the large, elongated high-purity silica body (12M tonnes >95% SiO) drilled by the Newfoundland Government in 1967 as part of an Island-wide silica assessment program. The diffusely bounded, irregularly shaped silica lies at the boundary of amphibolite gneisses and mica-schists, and within mica schists, along the flank of a prominent aeromagnetic high. Its origin is unclear and past workers have proposed differing origins (e.g., meta-quartzite; quartz vein; silica replacement zone).
