Compared with gold and silver drilling intercepts, base metals showed less activity during the quarter. Copper entries in the table below are from exploration that was targeting primarily for gold and silver values in most projects, and lead and silver in the case of Cerro Los Gatos. The most significant of those intercepts come from skarns at the Morelos Complex, where copper constitutes a valuable by-product of gold mining by Torex Gold. The second strongest results are from Pan American Silver’s La Colorada Skarn, but the low grades in those long intercepts are not that promising for recovery in future mining operations. Good copper grades are being encountered by Orla Mining at Camino Rojo’s Zone 22, associated to a newly identified felsic dike (wouldn’t be nice to know the related alteration?). At Cerro Los Gatos, Gatos Silver is encountering higher copper grades at depth in this intermediate sulfidation epithermal system, while mining nice lead and zinc grades. And finally some copper grades are coming from the intermediate sulfidation epithermal veins at Cristina, which is probably related to a porphyry copper system.
The abundance of poly-metallic deposits in Mexico can be assessed in the table below, as many deposits are found under several metals sections. mention apart deserves La Colorada Skarn, with long intercepts with good grades and around and order of magnitude greater grade-meter numbers than the next one in the case for zinc, and over that in the case for lead. At La Parrilla, CRD, skarn and intermediates sulfidation mineralization styles are present, while at Plomosas CRD mineralization seems the more accurate description. Camino Rojo is another of those complex deposits, with skarn, CRD and intermediate sulfidation epithermal mineralization styles present. The rest of the properties in the list are intermediate sulfidation epithermal systems, which in the case of Cristina is probably related to a porphyry coppers system. Interestingly, zinc grades mostly more than double lead grades in the table.
