공지 • Jan 17
Volta Metals Ltd. Confirms Presence of High-Grade Gallium, Cesium, Tantalum and Lithium Mineralization At the Recently Acquired Zigzag Project in Ontario, Canada
Volta Metals Ltd. announced the results from the initial sampling of its recently acquired, wholly owned, ZigZag Property (the "Property"), that is contiguous to its Falcon West Lithium Project, located in the Thunder Bay Mining District of Northwest Ontario, Canada. A total of 21 samples (six representative characterization samples and 15 channel samples) were collected immediately following the acquisition of the ZigZag Project in November 2024. The assays from these samples confirm the presence of very high-grade Lithium, Tantalum, Cesium, Rubidium, and Gallium mineralization at the Dempster East pegmatite located 7 km west of the Company's Falcon West pegmatite swarm. The ZigZag property is located within the Caribou Greenstone Belt, which trends east-northeast along the top of Lake Nipigon. The Caribou Lake Greenstone Belt extends eastward from the larger Onamon- Tashota Greenstone Belt, and lies along the northern margin of the Wabigoon Subprovince and associated granitoid intrusions. Structurally, the ZigZag property is bisected by two major deep-seated crustal structural trends that are considered to control significant lithium pegmatite swarms at Falcon West and the Aubury Pegmatite systems. The property is unexplored, and the Company considers the potential for the discovery of Ta-rich Lithium pegmatites as good to excellent. The Dempster East pegmatite was discovered in 1956 and initially explored by Dempster Explorations Ltd. The outcropping irregular pegmatite body has an inferred length of 56m. The dip of the pegmatite and its size are currently unknown. However, the outcrop lies on the side of a small hill, indicating the potential for a large size pegmatite body. Six historic channel samples by Dempster Explorations Ltd. indicate an average grade of 1.88% Li2O. The mineralogy comprises abundant potassic feldspar and fine-grained prismatic spodumene associated with quartz, albite, muscovite, accessory blue apatite, and black tourmaline. There is no record of any historical drilling. The recent sampling by the Company indicates the presence of high grade rare elements such as Gallium, Tantalum, Cesium and Rubidium, in addition to high-grade Lithium. The data indicates that the Dempster East pegmatite is highly evolved, marking the transition from an albite-spodumene type to a complex type pegmatite system, as is the case with Green Technology Metals' North Aubry pegmatite deposit to the west. The Dempster East pegmatite has not been fully exposed on surface. The next steps of exploration will include stripping, prospecting, mapping, structural and a geophysical study of the area. The average Li2O content in samples devoid of host rock enclaves is 1.49 wt.% Li2O (range: 0.22 to 3.26 wt.%) which compares well with the historical average of 1.88 wt.% Li2O. The lithochemistry accrued from this early stage of exploration will greatly aid in continuing exploration of the larger mineralized system. The presence of more evolved pegmatites supports the exploration model that two pegmatites systems may coalesce in the larger land package, with significant discovery potential to the east of the Dempster East pegmatite, towards the Companies Falcon West property as well as to the southwest. The company plans to continue to explore these highly prospective areas and generate additional targets for initial discovery drill testing. Tantalum is significantly enriched in the Dempster East pegmatite. It has a mean value of 229 ppm and an overall range of 66.7 to 457 ppm, with 70% of analyses exceeding 100 ppm. The Nb/Ta ratio has a mean upper continental crust average of 16 and reveals strong fractionation as ratios plunge to 0.10 - 0.67, which typically occurs in complex-type pegmatite systems such as the Tanco pegmatite deposit at Bernic Lake, Manitoba. The cesium contents of the Dempster East pegmatite areconsiderably elevated, with a mean of 712 ppm and a range of 160 to 1,970 ppm that infer a transition to a complex-type pegmatite system. Similar cesium values are documented from the adjacent North and South Aubry pegmatite deposits (323 and 268 ppm, respectively). Furthermore, the mean cesium at Dempster East is considerably higher than the AM lithium pegmatite (210 ppm), 7km to the northeast that forms part of the Company's Falcon Lake pegmatite group, and supports an east-to-southwest direction of increasing fractionation for the ZigZag claim block. This supports previous data collected on Falcon West, that suggests the entire 7km unexplored structural fairway has good to excellent potential to host increasingly evolved pegmatites, containing multi-element rare elements. Rubidium is also enriched with a mean value of 3,006 ppm (ranging from 995 to 4,920 ppm) and broadly shows a positive correlation with cesium. A significant number of Rb anomalies (61%) exceed the 2,000 ppm level. The K/Rb ratio, a useful indicator of magmatic fractionation, has a mean of 8.3 in a restricted range of 4.1 to 11.7 that overlaps the average for the Tanco pegmatite deposit at 5.5 and the data population of the North Aubry pegmatite.