Big Marsh
BIG MARSH
Early Stage Exploration – Gold and Base Metals (VMS style mineralization)
- 100% Owned
- Majority of the project is untested
- 72 line kilometre ground magnetic field survey completed (2009)
- 3.7 line kilometre Induced Polarization survey completed (2009)
- 160 line kilometre VTEM survey completed (2010)
Overview
The property is located ~25 km southwest of the city of Timmins, and 2 km north of Melkior’s Carscallen gold property. The property has potential for both base metals (VMS style mineralization) and gold. The property consists of seven claims totaling 91 claim units (14.3 km2) in Carscallen Township within the Porcupine Mining Division.
Access to the Big Marsh property is via a series of roads and trails which connect to Highway 101, which is approximately 5 km south of the property. The main road/trail access is via a north-trending road which runs through Melkior’s Carscallen gold property, about 2 km south of the Big Marsh property. The trail gives access to a lake within the Big Marsh property; from there, several short ATV trails give access to the property. The last 3 km of trail before the lake are not maintained but are in relatively good condition; however the use of a 4 x 4 pick-up truck or an ATV is highly recommended. The Big Marsh property can also be accessed via the Malette road. The Malette road branch is approximately 1 km west of TEMBEC on the north side of Highway 101. The Big Marsh grid can be accessed via snowmobile trail at km 14 on the Malette road.
The property is 25 km southwest of Timmins, a small mining-friendly city with a long mining history and home to personnel with the skills to work in the mining industry.
Water and power are abundant in the region and the property contains trails/roads which could be upgraded to all-weather status if necessary. Suitable locations for constructing mineral processing facilities are abundant on the property.
Previous Work
Previous work on the Big Marsh property is incompletely documented. Placer Dome carried out a ground magnetic/VLF/HLEM survey in 1988 on a block of land west of Big Marsh Lake (Racic, 1988). They subsequently drilled two holes on present claim 4202649 in 1989 (Hunt, 1989). The holes intersected a sequence of mafic to felsic volcanics with interbedded chert, but no assays were reported. BHP Minerals had a block of ground that included the eastern part of the present claim 4202649 in the mid-1990’s. They conducted soil sampling (Lomas, 1993) and a ground magnetic/ VLF/MaxMin survey (Harrison, 1995) on a small amount of ground presently owned by Melkior.
Geology
Timmins is one of nine major volcanic centers of the Abitibi greenstone belt defined by Goodwin and Ridler (1970). The structural complexity and poor exposure of the
Timmins district have made comprehensive stratigraphic syntheses difficult. Instead, the district has been divided into a number of "tectonic assemblages" (Jackson and Fyon,1992), which are constantly being revised. These divisions are made on the basis of similarities in stratigraphy, lithochemistry, age dates and aeromagnetic and airborne EM signatures.
Relationships between different tectonic assemblages are typically not well known. Fyon et al. (1992) identified the Kidd-Munro, Kamiskotia (now thought to be part of the Tisdale assemblage; Hall and Smith, 2002) and to a lesser extent the Bowman as being the assemblages most prospective for VMS exploration in the Timmins District. This is based on the occurrence of high silica, FIII type rhyolite combined with basalt ± komatiite (i.e. bimodal assemblages). These assemblages also host the known VMS deposits and major showings in the district. Four deposits have been mined from the Kamiskotia assemblage: i) Kam-Kotia, which produced approximately 6.0 Mt @ 1.09% Cu, 1.03% Zn and 3.5 g/t Ag; ii) Canadian Jamieson (826,400 t @ 2.3% Cu and 3.5% Zn); iii) Jameland (461,800 t @ 0.99% Cu, 0.88% Zn and 3.5 g/t Ag); and iv) Genex, which produced 242 tonnes of concentrate containing 21 to 27% Cu (Binney and Barrie, 1991). The giant Kidd Creek deposit (181 Mt @ 2.9% Cu, 6.4% Zn, 92 g/t Ag; Galley et al., 2007) occurs in the Kidd-Munro assemblage.
A map of Carscallen Township produced by Hall and Smith (2002) indicates that exposure is scarce on the Big Marsh property. On a more regional scale map produced by Ayer and Trowell (1998), the property is shown as being primarily underlain by the same sequence of predominantly felsic volcanic rocks that host the VMS deposits of the Kamiskotia area.
LOCATION MAPS
GEOLOGY MAPS: