Recent drilling at Arian Silver’s San Jose silver project in Mexico has verified the location of the western strike extension of the San Jose vein system and prompted the company to increase its exploration effort.
Drill-holes in an area of the San Jose vein system known as ‘Solidad’, 1.4 km west of the San Jose shaft and head-frame, have intersected a wide (up to 25 m) vein system comprising silver and base-metal mineralisation.
A number of holes were drilled into Solidad where previous geological mapping and surface trenching identified several quartz-calcite-sulphide-rich veins within wide quartz-calcite-rich breccias. The drilling intersected the San Jose vein, which in places has spliced into two veins – the ‘Foot-Wall’ vein and the ‘Hanging-Wall’ vein – at 50 m, 100 m, and 150 m below surface. In addition, deeper drill-holes so far indicate that the San Jose vein widens from 3-5m at surface to more than 20 m at depth.
The company considers these results very encouraging since in the historical workings the wider intercepts of the San Jose vein contained the higher-grade material.
Drill-hole results have also been received from Arian’s drilling in the ‘Santa Ana’ area. Santa Ana is 800 m west of the San Jose shaft and head-frame, and the results confirm silver and base-metal mineralisation continuing down-dip below the historic mine workings of the old Santa Ana mine.
The drilling has identified a silver and base-metal-rich zone (up to 42 m wide) that extends at least 200 m laterally and 200 m vertically from the Santa Ana mine. This zone is open to the west towards the Solidad zone and also to depth. The eastern-most drill-hole has intersected a lower-grade silver and base-metal rich portion of the San Jose vein, which is typically found in the deeper portions of a classic epithermal vein system.
As a result of the positive and encouraging exploration results to-date and the recently discovered multi-faceted types of mineralisation in the San Jose Vein, Block 450 and brecciated stockwork target areas, Arian has decided to increase the size of its Phase-1 drill program from 7,500 m to 10,000 m.
Chief Executive Officer Jim Williams said the continued success of exploration gave him enough confidence in the project to up the drilling campaign. He said the Solidad area was completely unexplored before Arian started its drilling program and as a result of this program, the magnitude of the San Jose vein system was significantly larger than previously envisaged.
“The drilling in the Santa Ana area is also providing excellent results and drill-hole SJ-07-002 intersected high-grade silver and base-metal mineralisation within 4 m of our main haulage ramp in the westerly direction,” Williams said. “We believe the Santa Ana area also presents an excellent opportunity to move this project towards production in the not too distant future".