A BIG District

Copper mines need to big - Even with low-grade material such as the Aitik Mine in Sweden, size means everything when it comes to a copper-gold deposit. That is why Taranis is so keen on the Kittilä Copper-gold belt in Finland - it has already identified three deposits (Naakenavaara, Riikonkoski and Kettukuusikko) - and it is pursing more!

Landsat - One Part of Our Story....

Landsat 7 - A Useful Tool For Analyzing Regional Exploration Data in Finland

Shown below is a color composite image of the Kittilä Copper-Gold area. The river going through the center part of the image is the Ounasjoki River. The lines marked in black show the regional-scale fold that hosts all of the projects that Taranis is exploring in the area, covering an immense area 200 km2! The Sirkka Shear Zone skirts the northern flank of the "Z-shaped" fold structure and is shown in red. The black lines show the traces of bedding in the volcano-sedimentary package. What is now known from the Naakenavaara project is that two different folds intersect in this area forming a "basin". Taranis refers to this as the Naakenavaara Syncline, and this is important since we believe that the entire syncline hosts copper, gold, nickel and cobalt. The unique configuration of this Syncline means that much of it is near surface, and is possibly bulk-mineable. On this image the sky-blue colors are iron enriched areas that have been identified by ratioing some of the bands of the Landsat image.

Ratioing is an enhancement process in which the value of one band is divided by that of any other band in the sensor array. If both values are similar, the resulting quotient is a number close to 1. If the numerator number is low and denominator high, the quotient approaches zero. If this is reversed (high numerator; low denominator) the number is well above 1. These new numbers can be stretched or expanded to produce images with considerable contrast variation in a black and white rendition. Certain features or materials can produce distinctive gray tones in certain ratios; TM Band 3 (red) divided by Band 1 tends to emphasize red- or orange-colored features or materials, such as natural hydrated iron oxide, as light tones. Three band ratio images can be combined as color composites which highlight certain features in distinctive colors. Ratio images also reduce or eliminate the effects of shadowing.

Gold

Gold is found in ores made up of rock with very small or microscopic particles of gold. This gold ore is often found together with quartz or sulfide minerals such as Fool's Gold, which is a pyrite. Gold's atomic number of 79 makes it one of the higher atomic number elements which occur naturally. Like all elements with atomic numbers larger than iron, gold is thought to have been formed from a supernova nucleosynthesis process.

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Silver

Silver has been used for thousands of years for ornaments and utensils, for trade, and as the basis for many monetary systems. Its value as a precious metal was long considered second only to gold. The word "silver" appears in Anglo-Saxon in various spellings such as seolfor and siolfor. During World War II, the short supply of copper led to the substitution of silver in many industrial applications.

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Copper

Copper has been in use at least 10,000 years, but more than 95% of all copper ever mined and smelted has been extracted since 1900. As with many natural resources, the total amount of copper on Earth is vast (around 1014 tons just in the top kilometer of Earth's crust, or about 5 million years worth at the current rate of extraction). However, only a tiny fraction of these reserves is economically viable, given present-day prices and technologies

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Cobalt

Cobalt occurs in copper and nickel minerals and in combination with sulfur and arsenic in the sulfidic cobaltite (CoAsS), safflorite (CoAs2) and skutterudite (CoAs3) minerals. The mineral cattierite is similar to pyrite and occurs together with vaesite in the copper deposits of the Katanga Province. Cobalt is not found as a native metal but is mainly obtained as a by-product of nickel and copper mining activities.

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Lead

Roman lead pipes often bore the insignia of Roman emperors. Lead plumbing in the Latin West may have been continued beyond the age of Theoderic the Great into the medieval period. Many Roman "pigs" (ingots) of lead figure in Derbyshire lead mining history and in the history of the industry in other English centers. The Romans also used lead in molten form to secure iron pins that held together large limestone blocks in buildings.

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Zinc

Various isolated examples of the use of impure zinc in ancient times have been discovered. A possibly prehistoric statuette containing 87.5% zinc was found in a Dacian archaeological site in Transylvania (modern Romania). Ornaments made of alloys that contain 80–90% zinc with lead, iron, antimony, and other metals making up the remainder, have been found that are 2500 years old.

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