The Northern Miner, first published in 1915, during the Cobalt Silver Rush, is considered Canada’s leading authority on the mining industry.
DAWSON CITY, YUKON — Shawn Ryan could have retired. Ryan and his wife, Cathy Wood, are the Yukon prospecting team whose dedicated soil sampling led Underworld Resources to the million-ounce-plus White Gold deposit in 2009, a discovery that sparked a new Yukon gold rush. They also get credit for Kaminak Gold’s (TSXV: KAM; US-OTC: KMKGF) Coffee project, already at 3.2 million oz. and growing, and have at least another dozen soil anomalies on option to explorers across the White Gold district.
After years of scraping by on government grants and prospecting contracts, Ryan and Wood made it to the big leagues when Kinross Gold (TSX: K; NYSE: KGC) acquired Underworld for $138 million. With that payday, plus a steady stream of option payments, the team could easily have stepped back from the grind and enjoyed their just rewards.
Instead, Ryan and Wood spent the last 18 months figuring out how to make exploring for gold in the Yukon less expensive and more reliable. “I could see the crash coming and I could see there was so much money being wasted up here,” Ryan says in an interview in Dawson City. “So we took a step back and thought, ‘If we’re going to keep this momentum alive, we need to add something new — we need to figure out some simple new tools that will increase drilling confidence without costing millions.”
That is what he did. Ryan and Wood’s company GroundTruth Exploration offers a suite of novel exploration technologies that can turn a soil anomaly into high-confidence drill targets (if the anomaly offers up the goods) — in three weeks, and for $100,000.
The process starts with GroundTruth’s unmanned drone. Bought from the Swiss military, the small, remote-controlled plane takes high-resolution orthophotos — geometrically corrected and scaled aerial photographs — of entire properties in short order. The time frame depends on the requested resolution. Taking pictures with 4 cm resolution the drone can cover 10 sq. km in a 45-minute flight.
Each photo comes with a black box file that identifies the plane’s location on all three axes, which lets a mapping program stitch them together to create a scaled image of the property. The accurate photographic overview helps geologists in many ways: in identifying structures that are impossible to see from the ground, in planning exploration programs and in overlaying various mapped data.
“For example, when we drape our induced-polarization (IP) sections on our orthophotos, they are pretty well bang on,” Ryan says. “Before we had to use topographic data from the government, which is out by 20 to 30 metres, so you were always draping in mid-air.”
The next step in GroundTruth’s process is high-resolution IP. IP is a well-established exploration tool, but for Ryan it was problematic in two ways. First, conventional IP surveys offer perhaps 25-metre resolution, but many gold-bearing structures in the White Gold region are much smaller than that. At the Coffee property, for example, many key structures are less than 10 metres wide, and get lost in conventional IP data.
Second, conventional IP involves two electrodes connected by a long, heavy cable, a system that has to be dragged from point to point. That requires line cutting, which means slashing a few-metre wide swaths through the bush for each IP line. Ryan found that time-consuming, expensive and environmentally impactful.
For the rest of this article, click here: http://www.northernminer.com/news/shawn-ryans-new-yukon-vision/1002577788/rq0wMrp3vyWrlxu0q82vM20/?ref=enews_NM&utm_source=NM&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NM-EN09062013