Highlights
- The project is located in the central portion of the department of Antioquia about 70 kilometers northeast of Medellin on the Antioquia Batholith.
- Comprised of 10 concessions totaling 5,630 Hectares
- Structurally controlled, mesothermal, high grade vein deposits. Ore minerization includes gold, silver, copper and molybdenum
- Potential economic deposits in the project area include gold copper porphyries, mesothermal gold and metals, precious metal veins and stockworks.
- Extensive history of high grade artisenal gold mining on the project area
- Exploration projects in the vicinity include AngloGold Ashanti, B2Gold, Colombian Mines and ColGold.
- Excellent access, infrastructure and security in the area
- Strong local support and involvement in the project
- Environmental baseline work underway.
Concessions Map
Overview
The Cisneros Gold Property (Cisneros Project) is located about 70 kilometers northeast of Medellin in the Department of Antioquia, Colombia and consists of 100 percent ownership in six concessions ( 2 of which are referred to as the Guayabito properties and five which are referred to as the La Manuela properties). In addition, AGD has an agreement to acquire 5,243 Ha of contiguous land from Grupo de Bullet for a total of 5,522 Ha of available land in the Cisneros project area. The property is located in the Municipalities of Cisneros, Santo Domingo and Yolombo and is easily accessible year round by paved road from Medellin.
Gold mining in the Cisneros area has been carried out since Pre-Colombian times to the present. The Cisneros Project is underlain by an intrusive body of granodiorite to quartz diorite composition, called the Antioquia Batholith. Mineralization is controlled by two dominant structural trends in the area and evidenced by anomalous gold occurrences in more than 20 artisanal mining operations in the project area.
The climate is tropical though with elevations ranging between 1,200m and 1,800m the temperature is very pleasant. Transportation service to the area is provided daily by the bus companies Coopetransa and Coonorte from the city of Medellin. There are several hotels in Cisneros. There is ample single-phase electrical energy coverage, though it could be disturbed during electrical storms in the winter season. Water is abundant with all three drainages on the property flowing year round. The project area has a (COMCEL) signal for cellular phones. Internet, fax and scanner services can be obtained in the municipality of Cisneros. The National Police has permanent presence in the urban area of Cisneros. As well, the Army has a permanent base and does continuous patrols in the region. The property is mountainous with the western slopes being used as sugar cane plantations and to a lesser extent coffee growing operations at the higher elevations. The western slopes are gentle, and there are three main drainage gullies trending to the west-southwest.
Geology
The Cisneros Project is underlain by an intrusive body of granodiorite to quartz diorite composition, the Antioquia Batholith In the project area, the batholith is cut by two fault systems trending northwest and east-northeast.
The Antioquia batholith covers an area of 7,221 km2 and its satellite bodies, a further 322 km2. In the center and eastern part of the province, it is characterized as having lithologic homogeneity with little variation from one place to another. The normal facies have a tonalite and granodiorite composition and present subordinate facies, one felsic and the other gabbroic.
The shape of the batholith is trapezoidal, unlike other great plutons that extend in the regional tectonic direction and it is characterized by its petrographic and petrochemical homogeneity. It has discordant contacts with encasing rocks, generally intrusive rocks with aureoles contact development, of varied extension and magnitude, in pyroxene hornblende to albita-epidote hornblende facies. Very little deformation can be attributed to its intrusion; there are no changes in the shape or intensity of the encasing rock's deformation. The intrusive rock does not deflect the regional folding but instead truncates them and for that reason the pitch on the metamorphic or sedimentary rocks of San Luis vary little or nothing as they approach contact with the intrusive rock.
Deposit Type & Model
The Cisneros, occurrences can be classified as a mesothermal lode-gold deposit (Hodgson, 1993).
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"Mesothermal gold deposits are mostly quartz-vein-related, gold only deposits with associated carbonatized wall rocks. They occur in low to medium-grade metamorphic terranes of all ages, but only in those that have been intruded by granitoid batholiths. The deposits are characterized by a high gold/silver ratio, great vertical continuity with little vertical zonation, and a broadly syn-tectonic time of emplacement. They are commonly associated with pyrite, arsenopyrite, tourmaline and molybdenite. Mineralization may occur in any rock type and ranges in form from veins, to veinlet systems, to disseminated replacement zones. Most mineralized zones are hosted by and always related to steeply dipping reverse- or oblique-slip brittle-fracture to ductile-shear zones. In mechanically anisotopic host-rock sequences, the shear zones typically are controlled by pre-existing anisotrophies like volcanic flow contacts, dykes and early veins. Shear zone dilation is commonly the result of interference between intersecting sets of shear zones and is part of bulk inhomogeneous flattening in the seismogenic regime of the crust where fluid pressure varied cyclically between sub-lithostatic and supra-lithostatic. At the regional scale, the deposits occur in prograding arc-trench complexes in association with major transcrustal fault zones, linear belts of fluviatile to shallow-marine sedimentary rocks, and small felsic alkali and trondhjemitic intrusions, a co-spatial assemblage of structures and rocks that developed after the main period of accretions-related contractional deformation, but before much of the metamorphism and penetrative fabric. Ore fluids are CO2 rich and have been variously attributed to magmas, metamorphic devolatilization of supracrustal rocks and mantle degassing; most current opinion favours devolatilization of subcreted volcanic and sedimentary rocks, with modification by interaction with the crustal column between the sites of fluid generation and ore deposition"
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The initial exploration targets in the Cisneros Project area, particularily in the vicinity of Guayabito are orogenic lode gold deposits also known as mesothermal vein deposits. Numerous examples of this type of deposit are known throughout the world including the Campbell Red Lake deposits in Ontario and the Bralorne deposit in British Columbia. To date, exploration studies have demonstrated that the Guayabito vein systems have all of the attributes of the orogenic vein gold deposit including, but not limited to association with major structural break, quartz-carbonate vein association, low-sulphide assemblage with pyrite, chloritic and sericitically altered wall rock.
Mineralization in the project area is strongly controlled by structure. The mineralization consists of quartz veins with pyrite, chalcopyrite, copper oxides, molybdenum, silver and gold. The alteration is dominated by plagioclase to sericite and mafic minerals to chlorite. Silicification and secondary biotite was also observed, as well as minor potassic alteration locally.
History & Exploration
The Cisneros Project area has been subjected to in excess of twenty artisanal mining operation spanning hundreds of years ago to the present. Access to these workings provide a valuable information base through structural mapping and sampling.
Initial exploration work performed by Antioquia Gold Inc. and its private predecessor AM-VES Resources Inc. concentrated on the collection of data from the existing artisanal mines and exposed outcrops along the river and stream courses.
An initial due diligence and three subsequent surface (including artisanal workings) mapping and sampling programs have been completed to date.
The preliminary exploration includes geological mapping and sampling of underground tunnels, pits, and outcrops, the details of which are reported in the 43-101 property of merit report on the Guayabito property. A total of 221 samples were collected during the second phase of exploration (217 samples were sent for assay, while four samples were sent for gold and silver extraction testing). Rock samples with high gold values were collected during each program. During the due diligence program one sample returned gold values up to 23.7ppm with four out of seven samples reporting greater than 4.5ppm gold. With the preliminary exploration sampling 51 samples returned gold values greater than 450ppb, with four samples having gold assays greater than 20ppm and a maximum gold value of 40.81ppm.
The second exploration phase focused on the La Manuela properties and consisted of a total of 196 samples, of which 50 were on the surface, 118 underground and 28 samples used for the quality control of sampling and laboratory analysis. Results are pending.
The third exploration phase, which is still ongoing, is comprised of:
surface sampling and mapping
ground magnetometer work
survey work
soil sampling on 100m grid
rock saw channel sampling of mineralized structures
structural interpretation
definition of drill targets for Q1 2009
Initial mapping and stream sediment sampling is currently underway on the newly acquired Grupo de Bullet option lands.