Alicanto Minerals Ltd (ASX: AQI) shares are rocketing today after the company revealed new high-grade copper assays. At the time of writing, the Alicanto share price is up 7.69% to 14 cents, sneaking ever closer to a 100% yearly return.
Alicanto is a mineral exploration company, focused on the exploration and development of a portfolio of gold projects in the prospective geological provinces of Guyana. Its geographical segments are spread across the most unlikely of bedfellows: Guyana, Australia and Sweden.
Let's take a look at what's behind the booming Alicanto share price today.
Alicanto's copper discoveries
Alicanto's recent high-grade copper assays are from its first holes at Stone Lake, in the Greater Falun Project in Sweden. All of the company's exploration activities have historically been located in Scandanavia, but now it's also operating a little further afield.
Its Falun assays report results of up to 5.92% copper and the mineralogy suggests drilling is close to the source.
Assays from drilling at Stone Lake have returned 5.92% copper grades and 4.6 parts-per-million (ppm) of silver from 124 metres to 124.4 metres. The hole also revealed the presence of native copper.
With copper prices currently at all-time highs, it's not surprising to see the Alicanto share price surging on the results.
Both holes drilled to date at Stone Lake intersected an intensely skarn-altered sequence of volcano-sedimentary rocks (hornfels) and interbedded limestones (marble-massive skarn) in contact with a strongly deformed granitoid.
For any geology nuts out there, skarn is very interesting as it's a volcanically affected rock that forms out of magma from volcanic explosions. Alicanto says that the "combination of high-grade mineralisation and the significant alteration footprint" underlines the area's prospectivity for copper-gold skarn mineralised bodies.
Follow-up geophysics, including ground magnetic surveys and down-hole electromagnetic surveys, are now underway in a bid to identify nearby copper-gold and polymetallic skarn mineralisation.
Management comments
Alicanto managing director Peter George said:
This is a highly promising result. The intersected mineralisation, together with its textbook skarn alteration, strongly indicates that we have identified another intrusion-related copper skarn system, less than 10km away from the world-class Falun deposit.
The semi-massive character of the intersected copper-skarn system, some 80m beneath historic workings with similar mineralisation, in combination with the most intense, proximal and prograde skarn alteration so far encountered at Greater Falun, highlights the potential for significant mineralisation nearby.
Alicanto share price snapshot
As a small-cap share, the Alicanto share price has shown a huge degree of volatility on the ASX. In the past two months alone, it's dropped by as much as 30%. In the past 12 months, however, it has gained around 94%.
