Medinah Minerals (MDMN)

[RD759]

The drilling so far appears to have identified a number of fault-controlled breccias and associated veins, These are primarily steep-dipping linear bodies up to a couple of metres wide or so (don't forget that the drill intercepts are not true widths, but oblique intercepts into sub-vertical bodies - a 3m intercept at -50 is closer to 2.3m true width, etc). In themselves they don't appear to be high enough grade to present a viable mining target, particularly as their geometry mitigates against development by open pitting.

However, the drilling has confirmed the existence of a gold-bearing system and this may simply be a low-grade peripheral zone. It would make sense to analyse core samples for fluid inclusions and to get a handle on fluid chemistry, isotopic make-up and temperature of formation to see if the fluids can be tied to a magmatic (porphyry) source or whether the fluids have travelled from further afield via fault systems with a greater (meteoric) groundwater component. Further north in the Atacama there is a widespread series of gold-bearing veins that post-dates many of the porphyries; they were worked extensively by the Incas and even today are occasionally worked by artisanal miners, but workings are typically very shallow and grades only tend to be high in the weathered zone close to surface.

If the fluids have a magmatic signature then it would be worth drilling deeper holes to look for the source region, but I would wait until a deep geophysical survey had been done (such as a Titan-24 survey) to identify potential porphyry targets and provide vectors for the drills to aim at (otherwise you're just shooting in the dark).

It's still very early days and very little of the plateau has been covered as yet. Rather than carry on with further drilling it would be better to cover the plateau with geophysical and geochemical surveys to identify anomalies at surface and at depth and then investigate those in order of rank.