A wholly owned Colombian subsidiary of Northfield Minerals (TSE), Barro Blanco, has acquired options on El Diamante and Concordia, two mining concessions in the Andean Mountains of southern Colombia.
Barro Blanco can acquire the 44.7-hectare El Diamante property by paying US$250,000 over three years. It can acquire a 90% interest in the 99.9-hectare Concordia property by paying US$300,000 over the same time span. Both concessions are in Marino state, about 125 km west of Pasto. El Diamante has been producing gold for 30 years, at an average rate of 1 tonne of ore per day at a grade of 17.1 grams per tonne. Limited diamond drilling in the early 1980s by the Japanese International Co-operation Agency outlined 479,000 tonnes grading 5.8 grams gold and 90.1 grams silver per tonne. The mineralized zone, currently being mined, is more than 20 metres wide and extends for a strike length of at least 600 metres. The zone is open in both directions along strike and at depth.
Barro Blanco has also applied for exploration concessions totalling 50,000 hectares in the Diamante-Concordia belt. These concessions cover 25 km of strike length along a major gold-mineralized belt which is associated with faults and shear zones in the Romeral Tectonic Belt. This area is underlain by granodioritic intrusions and andesitic volcanic rocks of Cretaceous age. Gold mineralization occurs with sulphides in veins, stockworks and silicified zones in major north-northwest-trending structures. There is also excellent potential for outlining heap-leachable gold deposits in the oxidized cap rocks. Gold has been produced from small mines in this area for more than four centuries.
Northfield’s Colombian personnel are compiling data on the concessions in order to plan an exploration program which is expected to begin in the second quarter.
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