- Tulipan
Introduction
The Tulipan property is located 1,370 kilometers north of Santiago in the Sierra Limon Verde oxide copper mining district and is readily accessible by paved and good gravel road from the city of Calama 35 kilometers to the northwest. On the Tulipan property’s western boundary it abuts the Montezuma property, also held by Polar Star.
Claims & Ownership
The property consists of 19 exploration concessions totaling 5,000 hectares staked and owned 100% by Polar Star.
Property Geology
The property lies within the western sub-zone of the main Chilean porphyry belt and is mainly covered recent pediment gravels which have been shed of Paleozoic granitoids which occupy the NE third of the property. These meta-intrusives and sediments are the host rocks to the Chuquicamata porphyry deposits. Within the pediment cover an old open flux pit some 50m diameter by 25m deep exposes a very coarse quartz-feldspar pegmatitic granite body, typical of higher level siliceous plugs in the Chuquicamata system. The property lies due north of the Gaby deposit and may straddle the same northerly trending structure zone.
Mineralization
The walls of the flux pit contain many irregular patches and vein stockworks of limonite-goethite-hematite-green copper oxides plus a black sooty mineral which judging by spectrometer assays is a mixture of pitchblende and thorenite. Several old tunnels enter the pit walls where the higher concentrations of copper occur.
Exploration History
Other than the flux pit there are no public records of mining or exploration activity in the property area. During Polar Star’s field visits the flux pit was checked for uranium using an Exploranium GS135 gamma ray spectrometer. Uranium and thorium values were encountered varying from 15 – 250 ppm and 200 – 1,100 ppm respectively.
TopResource Potential
Exploration to date is insufficient to estimate resource potential however the property lies within the zone of Chilean copper mega porphyries, directly north of and straddling the same structure zone as CODELCO’S Gaby copper porphyry deposit with a minable reserve of 584 million tones of oxide copper grading 0.41% soluble. Hence the property is highly prospective for porphyry copper deposits.
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