Challacollo project area. (Image courtesy of Aftermath Silver).
Aftermath Silver (TSXV: AAG) announced that its field team has started to work on the Challacollo silver-gold project in northern Chile.
In a press release, the Canadian company said crews are now cutting and sampling 3,200 metres of previously unsampled historic core.
According to Aftermath, the program is designed to test the material outside of the high-grade structures that formed the mineral resource estimate, by sampling disseminated breccia style mineralization within the optimised pit shell that constrains the current mineral resource.
The new work program is designed to test the material outside of the high-grade structures that formed the mineral resource estimate
The miner also said that it plans to undertake preliminary metallurgical leach testwork on composites from this sampling program, with the hope of gathering data to investigate the potential to bulk mine and potentially heap leach the lower grade material at Challacollo, and conceptually, separately processing the high-grade structures through an agitated leach flow sheet.
“Following the highly successful resource estimate which added tremendous value to Challacollo, the next phase of our concept for the project is to test the hangingwall sequence where historically only visible structures were sampled,” Ralph Rushton, Aftermath Silver’s president and CEO, said in the media brief. “This sampling program is an important next step in our exploration and engineering efforts at Challacollo. If successful, the program will help further refine the objectives of the planned drilling at Challacollo.”
Challocollo is a low-sulphidation, epithermal deposit located in Region I in northern Chile, 50 kilometres south of the town of Pica.
According to a 2020 estimate, the project hosts a mineral resource of 6.6 million tonnes at 165 g/t silver in the indicated category and 2.8 million tonnes at 124 g/t silver in the inferred category.
Aftermath has an option to acquire 100% interest in Challacollo through a binding agreement with Mandalay Resources signed in 2019.
