Midnight Sun Mining Corp TSXV:MMA said this week it has cancelled its Dumbwa earn-in agreement with KoBold Metals. Midnight Sun retains 100% ownership of its flagship Dumbwa Target, one of four key targets in its Solwezi Project in Zambia. Since the announcement of the earn-in a year ago, no fieldwork had been carried out by KoBold on Dumbwa.
Midnight Sun said it is preparing to launch a 2025 Dumbwa exploration program under the direction of COO Kevin Bonel.
Dumbwa is a huge, high-grade exploration target. It features a 20 kilometre long copper-in-soil anomaly that represents an opportunity for Midnight Sun to make a potentially major copper discovery. Dumbwa has long been seen as an analog to Barrick’s TSX:ABX billion tonne Lumwana Mine. Lumwana, located just west of the project, features almost identical geology.
Lumwana has just undergone a major transition, leading to Barrick’s announcement of a new feasibility study for a super-pit expansion. This would lead to doubling the mine’s annual copper production.
Midnight Sun’s President & CEO, Al Fabbro, stated:
“Midnight Sun has remained one of the longest standing explorers in the heart of the prolific Domes Region of Zambia. For 13 years, we have explored our vast land package, making significant discoveries of both high-grade oxide copper near surface, and high-grade sulfide copper mineralization at depth. We have never lost sight of the unique position we are in, to explore multiple top-tier copper targets in arguably the top location in the world for copper discovery. The Domes Region of Zambia is undeniably special, as evidenced by the world-class mining companies and the mines they operate surrounding us.”
Dr. Bonel is the geologist responsible for leading the exploration team that transformed Lumwana into a tier-one asset. He joined the Midnight Sun team this past year. The miner can now draw on his expertise in driving its exploration at Dumbwa.
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Dumbwa “as good as it gets”
The Dumbwa target is a near-surface, low strip, huge scale exploration opportunity. It has very similar geology and mineralisation to Lumwana.
“This is as good as a target gets in the Zambian Copper Belt,” Dr Bonel said.
“Over my decades of experience in the belt, ideal targets that have turned into mines featured key characteristics such as a strong geological team in place, a large coherent soil anomaly that is consistent with the ‘right geology’, bedrock exposure close to or at surface, and biological anomalies such as copper clearings. Dumbwa has all these criteria in abundance.”
Dumbwa and Lumwana are both north-south trending, 15 degrees east-dipping schist-hosted mineralised zones. Both have multiple, stacked, mineralized horizons. Previous drilling has demonstrated that the copper-in-soil anomaly at Dumbwa is directly tied to bedrock schist-hosted copper sulfide mineralisation. But, by comparison, the geochemical anomaly at Dumbwa tends to have a higher copper tenor at surface. The anomaly is also laterally more extensive than found at Lumwana.
The geological team is soon to get the 2025 exploration program underway. They will start with an extensive IP campaign to determine the precise location and orientation of the mineralised Dumbwa units. This will be immediately followed by carefully targeted drilling to determine the full lateral extent of the copper mineralized system at Dumbwa which underlays the strong, coherent, copper soil anomaly that remains largely untested along its strike length.
2025 exploration plans for Dumbwa
The soil anomaly over Dumbwa is well-defined. In places it has extremely high copper tenors. But the soil anomaly has never been tied precisely to the mineralised units beneath the anomaly.
To resolve this, Midnight Sun Mining is planning a detailed geological mapping campaign coupled with a wide-spaced induced polarization “IP” survey along the 20 kilometre long Dumbwa target. The results from this survey should locate the sub-surface extent of the mineralised units. It should also provide valuable information on the deeper trend and dip.
The results of the geological mapping and IP survey will be used to guide follow-up drilling to intercept the mineralised units, and build the geological and mineralisation models. They will also begin to form and demonstrate the potential of Dumbwa as a large tonnage, near surface, copper deposit. The surveys are anticipated to commence in Q2 of 2025 with drilling to closely follow the conclusion of the surveys.
