Mexican Silver

The San Celso project covers a number of historic mines that exploited a series of narrow silver-base metal veins hosted in a quartz monzonite, on the east flank of a large rhyolite stock.

All we received was:

• AutoCAD maps of the mine workings.

• A assay data excel spreadsheets.

So we didn't have much data to work with!

INEGI provide (for free - link here) TIFFs and ArcGIS shp files for Mexico at 1:50K scale. We used this to create a topo surface in Leapfrog to use for our model.

The level maps contained a huge amount of information including the geology, structures and sample location for each level in the mine.

We were able to extract this data and create a database for the underground samples and could then import it into Leapfrog GEO and use it as a base to create a 3D model of the geology and mineralisation.

Reviewing satellite photos identified several parallel structures. These were modelled to see where they see where they would project into the property.

We can quickly see that we have a series of narrow epithermal silver veins emplaced into a quartz monzonite that are truncated by the Oligocene-aged rhyolite stock.

We now have a accurate 3D representation of the project geology, but we can do more with thet data.

But there is more we can do with the data. Working with the sampling data we can create grade interpolants for various elements to model their distribution. We can see clear trends in the mineralisation and see that where there are vein intersections and changes in orientations, we can see that silver grades are significantly higher than in other areas.

We can also use this as a base to guide future exploration programs. We can use these models to create drill programs that focus on exploring the best targets and to help maximize exploration success.