Vancouver, B.C.: Phoenix Copper Corporation ("Phoenix" or the "Company") (TSX-V Symbol: PHC) is pleased to announce that the Company's continuing program of sampling water well cuttings in the Copper Joe project area has returned more native copper and expanded the area of native copper and exotic copper oxide occurrences at Copper Joe to 22 square kilometers from the previous 14 square kilometers. The most recent native copper discovery came from a water well drilled recently at a location 4 kilometers west of Phoenix's CJ-2 drill hole.
This new water well cut young gravel deposits overlying sericitically altered granodiorite porphyry of the Laramide-age Diamond Joe stock. The altered porphyry from the deeper water well cuttings contained visible grains of molybdenite, sphalerite, chalcopyrite, and abundant pyrite. The well is located above the footwall block of the faulted Diamond Joe porphyry system. Four other drill holes and one outcrop locality in the Copper Joe project area carry exotic copper. The new discovery of native copper at this well location reinforces the interpretation that the source of the 11-kilometer-long, east-northeast trending plume of exotic copper at Copper Joe was a previously exposed copper deposit at the western end of that plume. The eastern part of that copper deposit is believed to have been faulted off by a regional fault (as demonstrated by drilling at the Company's Kabba project to the north) and to now lie in bedrock within the Company's land position.
The highest concentration of exotic copper found to date at Copper Joe was in the bottom 15 meters of diamond drillhole CJ-1 where the Company drilled over 700 meters of native-copper-bearing gravel. This hole was terminated in gravel when the capability of the drill rig was reached at a depth of 1218 meters. The Company's pending drill program to deepen that drillhole is expected to encounter sericitized porphyry bedrock similar to the native copper-bearing gravel fragments found in the bottom of CJ-1. A pronounced change in the gravel in the same bottom 15 meters of CJ-1 from rounded, unaltered Precambrian cobbles to angular, goethite-stained, sericitized porphyry fragments carrying native copper leads the Company to believe that bedrock is not much deeper and that the bedrock composition should match that of the expected porphyry target. A Titan-24 IP/MT electrical survey across the target that was conducted by Quantec Geoscience Ltd. in late 2010 showed a high-resistivity formation that is believed to be bedrock near the depths attained by the two previous core holes. Both drill holes were cased over much of their length and filled with heavy bentonite mud to increase the likelihood that they could be successfully re-entered and deepened with a drill rig capable of drilling beyond 1200 meters.
The Company's Copper Joe target is the buried, faulted top of a known giant porphyry copper-molybdenum system called Diamond Joe. Intense exploration in the 25-square kilometer outcropping root zone of the faulted Diamond Joe intrusion provides ample evidence that this outcrop represents the deeper levels (root zone) of a porphyry copper deposit. Phoenix's management believes that the most copper-rich part of this system has been truncated by a fault and lies under gravels some 8 kilometers to the east of the Diamond Joe root zone. It is directly over this faulted target that the Company has now found 22 square kilometers of native copper mineralization in capping gravel deposits. Concentrations of native copper in the gravels over such a large area suggest a significant copper source in the underlying bedrock.
The Company is committed to the continuing exploration of its Kingman copper porphyry assets which include both the Copper Joe and the Kabba projects. Collectively these two assets have received approximately $7 million in work expenditures to date.
No mineral resource has yet been identified at the Copper Joe Project. There is no certainty that the present exploration effort will result in the identification of a mineral resource or that any mineral resource that might be discovered will prove to be economically recoverable.
Qualified Person
Dr. Timothy Marsh, Ph.D, P.Eng, President of the company, a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101, has reviewed and approved the scientific and technical content in this press release.
On behalf of the Board of Directors of
Phoenix Copper Corporation"Brian Leeners"
Brian Leeners, CEO & Director
For further information please contact the Company
Tel: 604.568.1823
Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
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