Iceland Gold-Silver Mine Completes 8 Drill Holes, Cumulative Drilling Footage of 780.7 Meters

en.Wedoany.com Reported - On October 13, Canadian mining exploration company Aurania Resources announced that it has completed the 2026 drilling program at the Thormódsdalur gold-silver project in Iceland, with a total of 8 diamond drill holes completed and cumulative drilling footage of 780.70 meters. Most drill holes achieved core recovery rates at or near 100%, a significant improvement over the approximately 50% or lower recovery levels in previous drilling. Geological structural features consistent with an epithermal gold-silver mineralization system were observed in all drill holes. Core samples have been sent to the laboratory, and assay results are expected to be announced in November.

This round of drilling was undertaken by Arctic Drilling Company Oy Ltd of Finland, using HQ3 diamond coring technology with a core diameter of 68 millimeters. Most drill holes were collared around historical drill hole locations as re-drilling, with a focus on re-acquiring samples from mineralized zones that were not fully preserved previously due to core fragmentation and recovery losses. In historical drilling, some clay-rich vein material was lost during the coring process, resulting in incomplete sample preservation of the relevant mineralized intervals.

Geological observations of the drill core revealed the presence of quartz veins, hydrothermal breccias, and chalcedonic quartz with banded structures within the drill holes. Some veins were fractured by later fault activity, with quartz veins sheared into fragments less than 1 centimeter in diameter and mixed with clay-rich material. Better-preserved veins exhibit colloform banding, plumose, and moss-like textures. Aurania Resources interprets these features as geological evidence of epithermal mineralization in a paleo-geothermal system.

Drill hole TARU2026-06 intersected the Thor vein zone at a depth interval of 17.50 meters to 19.90 meters, recovering core composed of epithermal quartz veins, vein fragments, hydrothermal breccias, and clay-rich material formed by later faulting. This interval has a length of 2.40 meters, which is the drill hole intersection length and not the true thickness of the mineralized body. The coring results have been used to identify the vein structures and the impact of later fault activity on the mineralized zone.

The Thormódsdalur project is located approximately 20 kilometers east of Reykjavík, with the mineral rights held by Iceland Resources, a subsidiary of St-Georges Eco-Mining. On April 27, 2026, Aurania Resources signed a phased exploration option agreement with two companies, stipulating that Aurania Resources can earn a 70% interest in the project after investing 5 million US dollars in exploration funds over 4 years. The agreement requires minimum cumulative additional exploration expenditures at each anniversary milestone of 500,000 US dollars, 1 million US dollars, 1.5 million US dollars, and 2 million US dollars, respectively.

The core samples obtained in this round have been submitted to ALS for testing, with sample preparation carried out in Sweden and subsequent analysis conducted in Ireland. The assay work will provide gold and silver grade data for this drilling program and will be used for subsequent mineralization evaluation and preliminary resource estimation studies for the project.