Prime Meridian Resources Corp. - Kiernan

Overview Regional Geology Baraga Basin Kiernan Wilson Creek Winterfire Bangston Mid Stage Properties

Overview
At the Kiernan Sills Project, large gabbroic intrusions of Paleoproterozoic age are differentiated into lithologies that include thick peridotite (ultramafic) units in the footwall portions of the sills. Prime Meridian developed several targets in the sills, some of them associated with the ultramafic footwall, by a combination of geological mapping/sampling and airborne magnetic/EM surveys. In 2007 Prime Meridian drill tested 3 targets without encountering economic mineralization, and 2 more were eliminated by grid mapping and ground geophysical surveys. Three remaining targets will be drill ready after the receipt of routine surface use permits, which are expected in early 2008, and minor ground geophysical confirmation work. Plans are to begin drill testing the highest priority target, KN-20, shortly thereafter.

Project description, location and land tenure
This Project Area is in southeastern Iron County, Michigan, 16 kilometres north of the town of Crystal Falls, population 3,500. The Project Area is accessible year round via a network of secondary roads connected to U. S. Highways 2 and 141, and Michigan Highways 95 and 69. The Chicago-Milwaukee-St. Paul-Pacific Railroad passes through the Project Area, which covers approximately 57 square kilometres. Prime Meridian's land position, initially consisting of approximately 1,820 hectares under various State of Michigan and private landowner leases, was reduced by the end of 2007 to 470 hectares as a result of target eliminations by ground surveys and drilling.

Geology
Regional Geology

Project Geology

Kiernan Sills Geology

The Project Area is entirely underlain by Precambrian rocks that strike northwest and dip moderately southwest along the southwestern flank of an anticlinal structure known as the Amasa Oval, which is cored by Archean granite and granite gneiss. The Archean core of the Oval is unconformably overlain by Paleoproterozoic metasediments and metavolcanics of the Marquette Range Supergroup, which includes metabasalts of the Hemlock Formation. The East and West Kiernan sills intrude the Supergroup rocks, primarily the Hemlock metabasalts, striking west-northwest and dipping steeply west. The poorly exposed East Kiernan sill, located 600 metres east of the West Kiernan sill, is the smaller of the two and appears from outcrop evidence to consist entirely of undifferentiated metagabbro. It has not produced any exploration targets to-date.

The large West Kiernan sill ranges from 600 to 1800 metres in thickness and crops out intermittently for a strike length of about 22 kilometres. Mapping studies by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and mapping, sampling and drilling by Prime Meridian show that this unit is differentiated into 5 distinct zones ranging from peridotite at the base to granophyre in the upper part of intrusion. From the standpoint of Prime Meridian's exploration efforts, the most important of these is the basal ultramafic zone.

The sills have been subjected to 1800 million year-old regional metamorphism that grades from greenschist facies in the southeast to amphibolite facies in the northwest. This metamorphism evidences that the Kiernan sills are at least 1.8 Ga in age (Paleoproterozoic).

History
There is a long history of mining iron ores from oxide facies (Superior-type) iron formations of the Marquette Range Supergroup in and near Crystal Falls, but the mafic intrusive complex represented by the Kiernan sills received no exploration attention until comparatively recently. The geology of the intrusive complex was studied and published by the USGS in Bulletins 1044 (1956), 1077 (1959), and 1226 (1967). Shortly after news became known of large deposits of copper-nickel in the Duluth gabbro complex in Minnesota, International Minerals and Chemicals Company (IMC) flew an INPUT survey over the Kiernan sills in 1971, followed by close spaced outcrop geochemical sampling that showed a few small zones of anomalous Ni-Cu values in the central part of the West Kiernan sill. IMC did not acquire any land or do further work. A couple of years later, the minerals division of Superior Oil Company did a reconnaissance stream silt geochemical survey of a large area covering the sills, succeeded by grid soil geochemical and geophysical surveys. Following up on induced polarization geophysical anomalies thus developed, Superior Oil drilled three holes in 1975, all of them in the granophyric upper unit of the West Kiernan sill. The drill holes found only very sporadic weak copper mineralization with pyrite and pyrrhotite; the best assay was .044% copper and .006% nickel over a one metre interval. No others are known to have explored in the Project Area until Prime Meridian began its work here.

Prime Meridian's Exploration Program
Although alert to other potentially fertile units, Prime Meridian's primary focus has been on the base of the West Kiernan sill, especially where it may be in contact with pyritic slates that are known to occur within the Hemlock metavolcanic sequence. In 2002 the company carried out rock chip sampling and soil sampling along contact zones, finding anomalous values of copper and nickel with disseminated sulfides up to 5% or so in gabbro near the western contact, and in weakly sulfidized peridotite near the eastern contact. It also found highly anomalous copper in Hemlock formation metasediments a few feet from the eastern contact.

Kiernan Sills, KN-20 drill target

In 2003 and again in 2005 Prime Meridian and then-joint venture partner BHP-Billiton Minerals Exploration flew two airborne electromagnetic and magnetic surveys over the Project Area, dubbed North Kiernan and South Kiernan. The airborne surveys identified many conductors, most of them located within Hemlock Formation metabasalts that are locally slate-bearing and conductive. In the South Kiernan survey, some of the data was unreliable because of the presence of three parallel large diameter natural gas pipelines crossing through part of the flight block.

In early 2007 the company drilled two holes in target KS-102 near the pipelines to test the eastern contact of the West Kiernan sill where anomalous copper had been found in outcrop. Although a thick sequence of serpentinized peridotite was encountered in both holes, sulfide content was very low and the assays showed no economically significant concentrations of base or precious metals. At the conductive KS-1 target, metaperidotite encountered by drilling at its contact with pyritic slates also failed to return significant assays. A hole drilled into conductor target KN-22 encountered multiple zones of disseminated and semi-massive pyrite-pyrrhotite in Hemlock metavolcanics with no significant base or precious metal values. (See press releases, May 16, 2007 and August 24, 2007). Two other targets, KS-103 and KS-19, were eliminated without drilling by grid geologic mapping and ground geophysics.

Current Plans

Ground geophysical surveying in 2007

Drilling at Kiernan Sills Project Area, June 2007

The company considers that three remaining leased targets are of high priority: KN-20, KN-21 and KN-23. The most compelling of these is KN-20, where an isolated airborne EM conductor is coincident with a strong magnetic anomaly lying near outcrops of texturally differentiated metagabbro. Prime Meridian is presently working to ready these for drilling. This involves obtaining routine State of Michigan surface use permits expected to be received in early 2008, making agreements with nearby private landowners for convenient road access, and conducting ground geophysical confirmation surveys.