Click to enlarge – SE AZ copper / gold prospects & mines

“South32 has completed the US$1.3 billion acquisition of the 83% of Arizona Mining it didn’t already own” Mining Journal| https://bit.ly/2N3evAx

What is now Australian miner South32’s Hermosa Project is part of a zoned porphyry copper hosted by Paleozoic metamorphized limestones (meta sediments) that are essentially an extensive zoned skarn deposit and are like the Hay Mountain Deposit as will be shown when the total extents of the Hay Mountain Deposit is drilled. For these reasons, and encouraged by its proximity and subsurface continuity with the nearby Tombstone porphyry copper and precious metal district, also a zoned skarn mineral body, we find that this is simple zoning of the surrounding porphyry copper deposits.

The difficult part for Arizona Mining (and currently Liberty Star) was / is raising the money and drilling the numerous drill holes necessary to measure the Hermosa.

The same kind of mineral zoning is exhibited in Hudbay Minerals’ Rosemont Camp to the west of Hay Mountain in Pima County, which is now drilled out and currently working through the permitting process.

The Hermosa Project is primarily on private land, so the total timeline from recognizing the potential, acquiring land, drilling the deposit out (at one time there were 15 deep capacity drills operating at the same time – making it the largest drilling project in the world, they say), definition of metal reserves, and sale of the project by a buyer for US$1.3 billion was relatively quick by today’s standards. There is more to say about the quickening pace of exploration, development and mining events around southeast Arizona, which had been fairly quiet for many years – since the end of WWII some 70 years ago.

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LSUM Update 805