Prospech have identified broad zones of carbonatite which have shown potential to be enriched in rare earth mineralisation after inspecting a historical drill core at its Korsnäs Project in Finland.
It is just one of the 60 historical lead-focused drill cores available for inspection, representing swathes of territory which remain unsampled for rare earth mineralisation.
Prospech Managing Director Jason Beckton said historical data combined with information from a recent site visit had made the possibility of a substantial rare earth occurrence increasingly evident.
The previous Korsnäs mine, which the Korsnäs Project tenure surrounds, primarily produced lead, with only a small amount of rare earth concentrate extracted in its final years,” Mr Beckton said.
“Now, the focus is on exploring for REE, and observations from the recent core logging and sampling
have revealed that potential zones of REE mineralisation were not sampled if there was no obvious
association with visual lead.”
“The rocks that contain REE are more widely represented in the drilling than the lead bearing ores and both drilling and geophysics suggest that multiple parallel stacked zones of REE mineralisation should be targeted.”
While inspecting the core, Prospech geologists noted the carbonatite host is much broader in extent than historical sampling indicated, and data for the full rare earth suite was only located for one interval in one hole – which returned a heady strike of 6.2m @ 1.75 percent TREO.
The closed lead mine lying nearby also left a tailings storage facility for use, opening a readily accessible rare earth target that can be quickly explored as Prospech await the results from over 60 untested core samples.