A good luck rainbow arches over the Phoenix field crew This year, AMT is playing an important role in exploring for nickel in northeast Canada. The Voisey's Bay nickel deposit, worth billions of dollars, was discovered in 1994 in Labrador, the mainland portion of Canada's most easterly province, Newfoundland. This bonanza sparked an exploration boom. Since
1994, millions of dollars have been spent by large and small mining companies to survey hundreds of claim blocks. Thousands of kilometres of airborne geophysical surveys were flown and thousands of metres of holes were drilled. In spite of this massive expenditure, to date the only economically viable deposits discovered are at Voisey's Bay.
The push is on to look deeper and to use AMT to focus deep drilling efforts.
Exploration entered a new phase in 1997 as hundreds of AMT measurements were made to map the known ore bodies and to explore for new ones. AMT is a deep-probing technique which identifies zones of increased electrical conductivity as deep as two km below the surface. Deep nickel deposits are detected by AMT, proven by Phoenix's work in
Sudbury since 1992 (see Issue #7)
On some properties in Labrador, gravity or airborne magnetic anomalies identified from '94 to '96 have not been explained by shallow drilling or shallow geophysics done to date. One possible explanation for the anomalies is that they're caused by iron -containing abut electrically resistivel upwelling crystalline rocks; another is that they're due to electrically conductive nickel deposits (nickel has magnetic properties similar to iron).
The basic objective of the AMT surveys in Labrador is thus to discover whether any of the known deep-seated gravity and magnetic anomalies are also zones of increased electrical conductivity. If so, they become more promising drill targets.
The push is on to look deeper and to use AMT to focus deep drilling efforts. If just one new economic deposit is found it will indeed be the
pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. |
