TRACTION URANIUM CORP. Traction Uranium Corp. and F3 Uranium Corp. announced that the Hearty Bay fall 2022 and winter 2023 till sampling and prospecting programs resulted in the discovery of two linear dispersal patterns of uranium in subglacial till on Isle Brochet, and six new radioactive boulders which assayed up to 4.23% U3O8.
The program aimed to determine the source area for previously identified Isle Brochet uraniferous boulders that are interpreted to have been glacially entrained from the Athabasca Basin boundary and transported onto the island. The presence of mineralized basal conglomerate boulders within the Isle Brochet boulder trains strongly suggests the source of the boulders is at the edge of the Athabasca Basin or associated with a sandstone outlier beyond the basin edge. The winter 2022 diamond drill program at Hearty Bay tested marine seismic targets interpreted as sandstone outliers or sandstone filled structures beyond the current basin margin.
Drill-testing indicated that the seismic targets did not represent sandstone outliers, and no significant geochemical anomalies were identified. Efforts were, therefore, refocused towards developing drill targets for winter 2024 at the edge of the Athibasca Basin. This commenced with the engagement of Palmer, who developed and executed the base-of-till (BoT) program that revealed the two linear dispersal patterns of Uranium mineralization near Isle Brochet and providing new target areas for drill testing.
In the fall of 2022 F3 retained Palmer's Dave Sacco, Principal of Surficial Geology and Exploration, to complete a reconnaissance field visit to Isle Brochet. The purpose of the field visit was to characterize the surficial environment where high grade uranium boulders have historically been discovered and identify suitable exploration strategies that would provide a more robust data set to supplement ongoing exploration efforts and develop reliable drill targets for winter 2024. The F3 team prospected the southern part of the island, discovering new in-situ mineralized boulders, as well as the mainland to the west.
It was found that sediments at the surface were ubiquitously reworked by deglacial processes, but suitable subglacial till for sampling was commonly present at depth. As a first derivative from bedrock, subglacial till is an optimal media for exploration and samples collected from 20 locations contained anomalous uranium concentrations. An island-wide base-of-till sampling program was developed by Palmer to follow-up on these initial anomalies.
A LiDAR survey was flown and detailed mapping of glacial landforms and sediments from the high-resolution data revealed a refined sediment transport history and informed the BoT sampling program that was subsequently completed during the winter of 2023 with Palmer's purpose-built ShockAuger lightweight drilling system. The data from the winter BoT sampling program revealed two discrete linear dispersal patterns in subglacial till composed of uranium and other pathfinder elements (e.g., Ni, Co, Cu).
