Thanks for the comments!
I am following the progress of the UKKO occurrence from a slightly different perspective and am sharing some of my thoughts here. Please feel free to shoot them down with well-founded arguments if my thinking is off.
In my opinion, the UKKO discussion currently focuses quite a bit on individual intersections and their grades, but a bit too little on the geometry of the occurrence.
When thinking about the upcoming resource, the decisive factor in the end is not an individual drill hole, but the size of the mineralized body.
Tonnage = length × width × depth × specific gravity
That is why the depth continuity interests me at least as much as the strike continuity right now.
In the case of UKKO, there has been a lot of talk in recent months about the growth in strike length:
- about 650 m of the known main zone in the north
- about 200 m for the southern zone
- in addition, about 500 m of the intermediate zone currently being analyzed
However, at least as interesting an observation in my opinion is that mineralization is still being encountered in relatively deep holes:
- UKKO-093
- UKKO-099
- UKKO-100
- UKKO-111
At least I don’t see a clear sign in the data that the mineralization is weakening at depth in the way it does in many occurrences that end up being small. On the contrary, significant intercepts still occur at depths of around 200–330+ meters.
For this reason, UKKO may no longer be just a length story, but increasingly a volume story. In my view, the latest update supports this idea, and its significance has hardly been brought up in the comments.
Simplified example:
- 650 m × 60 m × 150 m = 5.9 million m³
- 1000 m × 60 m × 300 m = 18.0 million m³
In this example, the length grows by about 54%, but the volume by over 200%.
Precisely for this reason, the depth vector can be just as important, or even more important, for the resource size than a few hundred extra meters on the map.
In my opinion, the most interesting open question right now is not:
“are the southern grades slightly weaker than the northern ones?”
but:
“do the northern zone, the intermediate zone, and the southern zone form a single folded system that also continues at depth?”
If the answer is yes, the resource growth is not linear, but three-dimensional.