Drill Campaign At The Quartz Rise On Iskut Project

TORONTO - Seabridge Gold has nearly completed the surface sampling and geophysics required to establish drill locations at its 100% owned Iskut Project in northwestern British Columbia and drilling will begin shortly. The focus is on the Quartz Rise target which emerged from last year’s program. Two phases of core drill testing are planned totaling 8,500 meters to evaluate the potential for high-grade gold concentrations within the untested Quartz Rise lithocap.

Over the past several months, considerable historical data has been compiled and integrated into the results obtained from Seabridge’s 2016 program which included 13 new core drill holes, re-logging of historical drill holes, a full tensor magnetotellurics (MT) survey and a hyperspectral survey. Interpretations of this robust data set continue to support the presence of a large, preserved Jurassic calc-alkalic porphyry system at depth, with an overlaying epithermal mineral system obscured by extensive leaching of the Quartz Rise lithocap. 

Detailed work is now in progress to define specific drill locations. Surface mapping is identifying multiple mineralized structures projecting into the Quartz Rise target area. These structures appear to form a graben which constrains the most intense alteration.  Further surface hyperspectral data collection has confirmed the chemical expression of higher temperature occurrences associated with this graben feature and co-incident with a promising negative magnetic anomaly. The primary target area hosts a package of clay-and-silica-altered tuffaceous rocks that are intensely leached at surface. Conceptually, the target appears to be a stacked lithocap-hosted precious metals system similar to the El Indio (Chile), Mulatos (Mexico) and Baguio (Philippines) gold deposits.

Commenting on the program, Chairman and CEO Rudi Fronk noted that “we are pursuing a classical model of metal deposition at Iskut which seems to explain the known data. In our view, Iskut hosts district-scale porphyry-style mineral systems similar to our nearby KSM project. These systems account for Iskut’s numerous gold and copper mineral occurrences. Our data suggests these systems could be largely intact from top to bottom, unlike KSM. We are concentrating our work on the upper parts of these systems, targeting the high-grade gold potential which historically has been the hallmark of the Iskut district”.