All right, welcome back into Mining Stock Daily, everybody. One of the headlines from this morning's news briefing on Mining Stock Daily was that out of a new discovery from Meridian's Santa Elena project there in the Copperbelt, Brazil. And it's been a while since I have got to connect with Gilbert Clark of Meridian Mining. So Gilbert, it's good to have you back on the podcast. I have missed you. I know you talked to Michael McCrae last time, but I've missed you. It's been a while.
Well, listen, we got a number of news items to come up including this morning's news release. You put out new holes from Santa Elena. The results point to a second layer of VMS mineralization beneath the original discovery. So let's talk about that. Geologically, how significant is this and how does it change your thinking about the overall scale of the system?
Yeah, it's look, it was it is actually quite a mineralization in Santa Elena. So what we've done, we've done a whole range of surface geophysics and surface geochemistry over the Santa Elena target. And so we've got the resource of Santa Elena Central and to the north of that is actually an IP anomaly which we've called Santa Elena North. We drilled an earlier hole there had some anomalous values. So we thought, okay, look, let's drill down deeper than so we'll essentially we drilled through collared the hole I think one of 150, 200 m to the south of it. And of the in the surface anomaly. And we drilled down and it was we could see the in the upper part of the hole there was a bit of mineralization that we associated with Santa Elena Central and we continued down to about 108 m.
I know it wasn't 108 m, it was um Oh gosh, what was the depth? 170 m. Think about 170 cm we started hitting sulfides, which is very interesting. We then went through the sequence of VMS mineralization that went down to 184.8 m. So in total that was 7.2 m of mineralization and it was robust. And this is what I really like about this. Now if we're not what sometimes you drill a system, you'll get enormous mineralization, but when I looked at the grades of what we encountered, you know, they they they have really do reflect some of the grades of him stronger grades that we've hit in the resources that we've drilled in the moment of belt. So that was very important. So if you imagine two stacked lenses, the upper one being Santa Elena Central where we got the resource, the current resource. And then you can imagine a second lens underneath that. It's where Santa Elena Central is. Now Santa Elena North is now been intercepted below it. So that's a tremendous result. And in the same hole, which I found to be honest, I found it a little bit more interesting. We encountered visible gold. You know, we had some RF there, wave the essays. And there was a good relationship. But we don't we hadn't seen visible gold at Santa Elena before. We do get it in Calisto. You saw, you know, that's some fantastic hits there that Carrapateena we see a visible gold in the latest stage gold over bit, but we also do see it in the VMS flat lying layers. So, from that, that's a tremendous potential for for future growth, future you know gold enriched VMS as we've seen in Carrapateena.
And then now what does this mean to the investor? Well, now we've gone through the advancing Carrapateena DFS trade. And now we've increased our budget for exploration and it's the frequency of these very robust intersections of strong mineralization over mineable widths that is it's starting to really interest me and this is one of the reasons why we've we looked at Santa Elena last year, we looked at the potential and we decided to go for the apply for the premier license as a second hub and that's a tremendous thing. So, if we can build these resources or these potential resources, these intersections of one of Alamo, Santa Elena north there upside on Santa Elena central then we really could see a second processing hub along the belt.
Um, obviously Santa Elena continues to appear it's getting larger with you know every new round of drilling that we've seen. But it's also unique to Carrapateena because it's a little bit more polymetallic in nature. I mean, you mentioned precious metals and the visible gold, but also comes with a little bit more zinc and lead than Carrapateena shows. I mean, this just improve it just seems to really continue to prove itself to be a standalone deposit, not necessarily a satellite to Carrapateena. I mean, that's absolutely the direction this thing needs to go, it seems.
Uh that'd be a yes, a fantastic result. Um, when we look at that, the the the PL preliminary license, the PL under applications for Santa Elena, now very successful in its application as a community acceptance of what we intend to do at Santa Elena. That would give reading uh with the Cabasal project uh 5.7 million tons of processing capacity along the belt. So, really we are looking to become that mid-tier producer. Uh there's there's just a a paucity of these type of companies on the we've seen it is the barely any on the on the TSX. So, this really gives the opportunity um for any shareholder or any interested party investor to come to our equities. And we're we're seeing tremendous liquidity in our equities now. Yesterday we traded over 1.2 million shares in London, at 1.8 million shares in Toronto. Um that's a fantastic result. But as you well know, Trevor, this has not occurred overnight. This has just been systematic racking investing to get to stage.
Yeah, absolutely. Uh talking about the different styles of mineralization between Santa Elena and Cabasal here, Gilbert. Um can you kind of maybe simplify us for us geological plebs about, you know, the the the conventional nature of a VMS deposit compared to what you're seeing to Santa Elena? I mean, Santa It seems like Santa Elena is a lot more complex, but obviously more valuable because of that complexity.
Yeah, yeah, it has a a high value per ton metal. Uh the recoverable metal value then and then the broad the broad Cabasal deposit, you know, if you if you look at Zion's mineralization like CD 240 in Cabasal, it smashes everything. Uh 12 m, 4 g gold, 1.7 copper. Boom, that's just that's just rocks to shock. Um but what we what I what I think for Santa particularly Santa Elena West uh and Santa Elena the north for me they indicate a lower temperature part of a VMS system. So, a VMS system is has alteration mineral distribution. We can roughly say it's related to the temperature of the of the fluids that came in. And what I see at Santa Elena West, Santa Elena north is perhaps the low temperature peripheral of another VMS pile that we have at Santa Elena. And that means we could get we're looking for the copper. Uh so, you know, that's what I really like to see in this in this deposit. A good genuine strong copper interval. You know, it might take 1 week, might take 2 weeks, 2 months, 1 year, I don't know. Um And all these things you got to send in the rotary lie detector and see that comes true. But we're pretty confident with our exploration programs at Santa Elena.
