By request of our client Admiralty Minerals (ADY:ASX), Goldberg did a resource estimation update of the iron resources of the reverse circulation drilling campaign of the project Soberana, following the approval of the environmental assessment evaluation on august of 2015, and the upcoming operation and production of iron ore.

The Soberana Mine is located to the south of the “Harper South” mining tenements, at 15 km to the south of the city of Vallenar, within the tenement called “Soberana 1/5” of 208 hectares, where old mining pits expose the iron mineralization mostly in the form of magnetite.
The estimation of iron resources was performed by Goldberg using the ordinary kriging method (OK) and the software GSLIB with five different parameters to build five kriging estimators, these estimators were then validated by cross-validation, and the best estimator was used to estimate on a block model with a grid of 96,000 blocks. Each block of the block model had a size of 5 meters by 5 meters by 2 meters of depth, having each block a volume of 50 cubic meters, resulting in the total volume of 4,800,000 cubic meters for the entire block model.

A ground magnetic survey performed in 2012 by Quantec Geoscience on the area, found two big anomalies, the main anomaly had very high susceptibilities, over 0.9 SI. The body of the main anomaly shows a depth of 150 meters and a horizontal extension of 350 meters by 150 meters. This body of magnetic anomaly was drilled in the same year in a reverse circulation drilling campaign that consisted of 9 drill holes in a length of 30 to 120 meters and sampled every 2 meters. A portion of the drilling samples was sent to the GEANALITICA laboratory for an analysis of the total iron content with the X-Ray fluorescence method (XRF), and another portion was analyzed on-site with a portable XRF analyzer, this data was used for the estimation after proper validation and statistical analysis.

Cutoff (Total Iron %) | Tons | Average Grade (Iron %) |
15 | 4,408,327 | 32.22 |
20 | 3,756,602 | 35.21 |
25 | 3,188,138 | 37.84 |
30 | 2,576,675 | 40.61 |
The resources were classified as inferred, as there are some remaining gaps of information that followed the drilling campaign, such as proper QA/QC and density analysis of the drilling samples, also a survey of the deviation of the drillings which was not performed at the time of the drillings. Nevertheless, given the high grade of iron, the tonnage of the current estimation, and also the features of the project, such as the proximity to the main city and ports, give a good picture of the project’s relevance within the portfolio of ADY.
