Manhattan Gold Corporation Ltd. July 7 reported that it leveraged a specialized aircraft already in Nunavut to complete a lidar survey over its 665-square-kilometer (257 square miles) Hook Lake project within the northern Canadian territory’s Kivalliq region.
“With a specialist survey aircraft already operating in the region, we were able to secure a dataset, that would normally carry a significant mobilization cost, at a materially reduced price,” said Eric Sondergaard, a technical advisor to Manhattan.
Manhattan Gold Corporation Ltd.
Data from the lidar survey, which covered the entire property, will support structural interpretation, gold targeting, and drill hole planning in the near term, and access analysis, and future environmental and engineering studies.
As the lidar survey was being flown overhead, crews on the ground were carrying out confirmation drilling at the historical Jaws gold deposit, as well as carrying out rock chip and channel sampling at the Vanquish target.
Australia-based Manhattan acquired the Hook Lake project in 2025. Last year’s first-pass surface sampling and mapping program focused largely on Jaws, the most advanced of 11 deposits and prospects historically identified at Hook Lake.
Based on exploration carried out in the 1970s and 80s, Jaws hosts 285,000 ounces of gold in an estimated 3.4 million metric tons of historical resource averaging 2.38 grams per metric ton gold.
Highlights from historical drilling at Jaws include:
• 52.78 meters averaging 3.38 g/t gold from a depth of 89.2 meters in hole 133-88-02.
• 16 meters averaging 5.04 g/t gold from a depth of 52 meters in hole 133-88-04.
• 15.2 meters averaging 4.5 g/t gold from a depth of 14.7 meters in hole 133-88-25.
Manhattan Gold Corporation Ltd.
Manhattan collected 47 rock chip and channel samples at the Vanquish gold prospect.
In June, Manhattan launched a reverse circulation drill program to confirm and expand upon the historical results before testing other orogenic gold systems and volcanogenic massive sulfide (VMS) copper-zinc-gold-silver targets across the property.
“This is the key operational step in the current program, moving the company from target definition into direct drill testing,” said Sondergaard. “In parallel, our field team has completed the first-ever channel sampling at the Vanquish prospect, with those samples now at the laboratory.”
Located about 35 kilometers (22 miles) southwest of Jaws, Vanquish is an outcropping target where historical surface sampling encountered up to 5.75 g/t gold over 1.5 meters.
This year, field crews collected 47 rock chip and channel samples at Vanquish, which have already been sent to the assay lab for analysis. Manhattan expects results from this surface sampling in the coming weeks.
“With drilling underway and Vanquish delivering its first systematic surface samples, we are generating multiple new datasets that will materially improve our understanding of the project,” Sondergaard added.
Author Bio
Shane Lasley, Publisher
Over his more than 18 years of covering mining and mineral exploration, Shane has become renowned for his ability to report on the sector in a way that is technically sound enough to inform industry insiders while being easy to understand by a wider audience.