The Monster Property is an Iron Oxide Copper Gold (IOCG) project in the Yukon Dawson mining district in northern Canada. The project covers 63.5 km2 over the Wernecke Breccia, a hematitic breccia belt of similar style and age as IOCG deposits on Southern Australia such as the Carrapateena and Olympic Dam.
The similarity of the Wernecke Breccia to known Australian IOCG was noted by explorers, and most of the breccia bodies, including the Monster Property, were staked in the early nineties. However, the exploration and expenditures were focused in the Wernecke Mountains to the east of the Monster Property.
The Monster Property was explored intermittently from the early nineties to the early 2000s. Despite prospecting success and the discovery of high-grade copper and cobalt at the surface only limited geophysical programs and drilling occurred. The property was abandoned after an attempt to drill a gravity anomaly in 2003. Unfortunately, the terrane corrections available at that time rendered the gravity data invalid and the hole did not intersect a gravity anomaly, nor significant mineralization.
Go Metals acquired a 100% interest in the Monster Property in the spring of 2018 and has undertaken three successful exploration programs on the property. With the data from these programs the Property is now ready for a substantial drilling program.
Go Metals focuses on integrating high-quality geological, geophysical and geochemical datasets in order to plan a successful drilling campaigns. To this end, Go Metals has flown a 75m magnetic survey, undertaken a remote sensing survey, mapped most of the alteration on the property, and collected 100m gravity stations across its most prospective targets. Two of these targets have also been subjected to a high-resolution IP-Resistivity survey, totalling 6 line-km.
Go Metals retained Precision Geosurveys to fly a high-quality magnetic and radiometric survey with 75m line spacing. The magnetic survey revealed several short-wavelength magnetic features at the survey and three large magnetic targets at depth.
The targets are 1.5 to 2 km wide and at variable depth. One of the targets underlays the Beast target area, in the east of the Property and is less than 200 m from the surface. The magnetic data was post-processed and inverted by Southern Geoscience and integrated with structural data by a remote sensing and IOCG-expert.
In early 2019, Go Metals processed historical gravity data using a new digital elevation model generated with 5m elevation data. The processing yielded good data that was consistent with local magnetic features and structures. It confirmed that collecting and processing gravity data in rugged terrain is now possible. High resolution gravity has never been used to target IOCG in the Wernecke Breccia before now, as a result of the low-resolution digital elevation models of the past (~90m accuracy).
Go Metals has used a drone photogrammetry survey to obtain a high-quality digital elevation model with an astounding resolution of 15 cm. This is the data that is now used to process the gravity data. Go Metals has collected about 900 new gravity stations in addition to the historical 500 gravity stations. The data has been inverted to a 3D gravity grid with 11m cell size to an error of ca. 0.03 mgal. To put this into perspective, the Carrapateena deposit was targeted based on a gravity anomaly of 2.5 mgal.
Two magnetic anomalies were measured with a detailed IP/resistivity survey. The survey was planned on a surficial magnetic anomaly at the Bloom target and on the magnetic anomaly that defines the Beast target.
The survey was carried out using an AGI supersting with 10 and 5 m electrode spacing over 820 m lines. On the Bloom target 4 lines were spaced 50m apart, and on the Beast target, 3 lines were spaced 25m apart.
A digital elevation model lineament analysis and mapping on the claim has identified several different fault sets on the claim. These are subdivided into 4 major sets. Some of the faults are parallel with the long axis of the breccia zones and trend roughly EW. These faults appear locally in the magnetic data, indicating they may be associated with the alteration. There is also a set of north-south trending faults that appears locally associated with mineralization. These fault sets are crosscut by a set of major steep normal faults. These faults cause the breccia zones exposed on the claim to be at different erosional levels.
The mineralization on the Monster Property occurs in hematitic megabreccias. The largest megabreccia exposed on the claim is several km wide and contains clasts of several hundreds of meters long. The breccias are variably altered, with dominant carbonate, hematite, specularite, and chlorite alteration.