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• Las Animas

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Introduction

The Las Animas property, located 725 kilometers north of Santiago, covers the historic Las Animas high grade oxide copper-gold mining district and is readily accessible by paved and good gravel road from the coastal city of Chañaral 25 kilometers to the northwest.

Claims & Ownership

The property consists of 21 exploration concessions totaling 6,200 hectares in surface area owned 100% by Polar Star.

Property Geology

The property cover a 20 kilometre stretch of the Atacama Fault System 10 km west of Anglo American’s Manto Verde open pit, SXEW copper mine (150MT @0.7% Cu) and is generally underlain by an Upper Jurassic monzonite-diorite-granodiorite intrusive complex belonging to the Coastal IOCG belt. Fault wedges of Jurassic volcanic and sediment rocks are present within these intrusives. This whole package is cut by large, 5-30+ m wide, N to NW trending structures belonging to the Atacama Fault Zone. The local Cu-Au mines occur within and lateral to these faults.

Mineralization

The mineralization encountered in all the old mines is typical of IOCG veins i.e. quartz-hematite- sericite plus copper sulphosalts, limonite and jarosite in the zone of oxidation and at depth quartz-magnetite-cpy-py. Copper pitch and judging by uranium counts pitch blende were also encountered in the old dumps.

Exploration History

There are no records of recent systematic exploration in the property area however small scale mining has been carried out on the larger structures since at least the 1930’s when ever copper prices permitted. Judging by the size of the dumps at some mines thousands of tons of copper-gold ore was mined over widths of 1-10m and to depths of at least 50-100m. During field visits in October 2007 all the larger mines (some 8-10) were checked for uranium using the Exploranium GS135 gamma ray spectrometer and gave strong U readings above 100ppm to a high of 620 ppm (1.36lbs).

Resource Potential

It would appear from this visit and their strong presence on sat-photos that these structures and their junctions and splay points should have good potential for deposits over 10 million tonnes. Geologically the property is similar to the Manto Verde Mine area hence could have larger tonnage deposit potential.