NioBay Metals begins magnetic surveys on James Bay Niobium and Valentine properties

NioBay Metals Inc. says an airborne high resolution magnetic survey has commenced this week on the company’s Valentine property located 100 km north-east of Kapuskasing. 

The same type of survey will be performed in the next few weeks on the James Bay Niobium property just 40 kilometres south of Moosonee.

The surveys will be performed by TerraQuest Ltd of Markham, Ontario. A helicopter with a fixed nose boom instrument will be used to get high precision data over 50 meter flight lines spacing. Additionally, the geophysical set-up will include Matrix Digital VLF-EM (extremely low frequency electromagnetic) data collection. A total of 1,134 line-kilometres will be flown over the Valentine property, and 2,574 line-kilometres over the James Bay Niobium property. The main objective of both surveys is to help better define the geological interpretation for future exploration program, as there is thick overburden and no rock outcropping in those areas.

Valentine Property 
The 100% owned-NioBay Valentine property was first acquired by map staking of 32 claims in 2018, which was then enlarged with 128 new claims in early in 2020. A 2.5 X 3.5 kilometre magnetic anomaly was tested in 1967 with three diamond drill holes. All three holes hit some carbonatite. The last hole encountered an average of 0.22% Nb2O5 in the last 77.1 metres of its 610 metres length within a sovite carbonatite. No other exploration works were performed since. The carbonatite complex is estimated to be at least 10 km2.

James Bay Niobium Property 
In 2016, NioBay acquired the James Bay Niobium property from a consortium of three companies: Barrick Gold Inc., James Bay Columbium Ltd. and Goldcorp Inc. The property is made up of a 26 km2 mining lease that was kept in good standing since the 1960’s and of the 309 additional claims that were map staked in January 2020. The large carbonatite complex has been defined with 85 holes totalling 14,000 metres of drilling. In 2016, NioBay re-logged and re-sampled 12 representative drill holes to confirm the overall quality of the previous works.

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