Cosa Resources announces its summer exploration plans for its portfolio of Athabasca Basin uranium projects in British Columbia. Highlights include:

Diamond drilling at Ursa to follow up on positive winter drilling results and test a second high priority target area. Ambient Noise Tomography (ANT) surveys are planned to prioritize targets at Ursa and follow-up airborne survey results at Orion. Airborne Electromagnetic (EM) and Gravity surveying at Aurora and Orbit are intended to advance these shallow, prospective projects towards drill readiness for 2025.

Keith Bodnarchuk, President & CEO, commented that after a successful winter drill program, they are eager to return to the field and continue exploration at the 100% owned Ursa Project. Alongside summer drilling at Ursa, including following up on exciting results from drill hole UR-24-03, multiple other projects will be advanced to drill readiness for 2025. With the completion of an oversubscribed C$6.5 million bought deal financing earlier in the year, they are fully funded to complete this work and well positioned to take advantage of a strengthening uranium market by expanding their pipeline of exciting drill targets across many of their highly underexplored uranium projects.

Andy Carmichael, VP of Exploration, commented that they are planning a busy summer season in the southeastern Athabasca with exploration plans that respond to the encouraging results of initial drilling at Ursa and reflect the discovery potential seen in their Orion, Aurora, and Orbit projects. Completing ANT before resuming drilling at Ursa will improve prioritization of existing targets and potentially highlight new target areas on trend. ANT work at Orion will follow-up the prominent, kilometre-scale sandstone hosted conductivity anomaly identified in 2023 and guide future exploration efforts. Work at Aurora and Orbit will advance these prospective projects towards drill readiness, which, despite being within 25 kilometres of the Key Lake Mill, have seen little to no modern exploration.

Ursa and Orion Ambient Noise Tomography Surveys
Ambient Noise Tomography (ANT) surveying is planned at Ursa and Orion beginning in May (Figures 1 to 3). Cosa expects ANT to prove a rapid, low-cost, low-impact method to evaluate broad areas for prospective structures and alteration zones. Using data collected from a grid of compact, standalone sensors to measure naturally occurring seismic activity, ANT produces a three-dimensional model of subsurface seismic wave velocity. As the Athabasca sandstone is relatively homogenous and seismic wave velocity varies with changes in the host rock, velocity variations can be attributed to post-Athabasca faulting and/or alteration zones characteristic of the region’s high-grade uranium deposits. Although ANT is relatively new to the Athabasca Basin, recent exploration drilling in the region targeting ANT anomalies has successfully intersected zones of hydrothermal alteration at depth.

At Ursa, ANT will be deployed over the 27-kilometres of conductive strike length hosting the alteration and structure intersected by UR24-03 at Kodiak, the Kodiak North, Smokey, and Panda West target areas, and all three weakly mineralized historical drill holes within the Project (Figure 2). Cosa anticipates preliminary ANT results will influence Ursa summer drilling planned to begin in August.

At Orion, ANT will follow up a prominent zone of anomalous sandstone conductivity identified by Cosa’s 2023 MobileMT survey. The 4-kilometre-long, 1.4-kilometre-wide anomaly is coincident with flexures in basement conductive trends (Figure 3). Cosa will use ANT to locate seismic velocity anomalies coincident with the conductivity features and to optimize the locations of ground EM surveying used to generate targets for diamond drilling.

Aurora and Orbit Airborne Surveys
Cosa will complete comprehensive airborne electromagnetic (EM) and gravity surveys to advance its Aurora and Orbit properties towards drill readiness for 2025 (Figure 4). EM surveying will be completed by Geotech Ltd.’s helicopter borne VTEM Plus system with the objective of identifying basement-hosted conductivity anomalies consistent with prospective graphitic structures and/or large zones of hydrothermal alteration. Gravity surveying will be completed by Xcalibur Multiphysics’s Falcon® Airborne Gravity Gradiometer system (AGG) with the objective of identifying gravity anomalies consistent with large zones of hydrothermal alteration and to improve the understanding of basement geology. Top priority drill targets would be gravity low anomalies coincident with basement-hosted conductive features. Airborne surveys commenced in early May.

Ursa Diamond Drilling
Planning is ongoing for summer diamond drilling at Ursa. Drilling is expected to include following-up the broad zone of hydrothermal alteration and post Athabasca structure intersected well above the unconformity by drill hole UR24-03 (Figure 5; see Cosa news release dated April 24, 2024) as well as initial drill testing of a second target area. It is anticipated that ANT survey results will be used to influence drill strategy and targeting.

Figure 1 – Cosa’s Portfolio of Athabasca Basin Region Uranium Exploration Properties
Figure 2 – Ursa ANT Survey Areas over 2023 MobileMT Results