Northern Gold Mining Inc. (“Northern Gold”, “NGM”) has Quality Assurance/Quality Control (“QA/QC”) protocols in place for all its exploration and development drilling. At the Jonpol and Buffonta Properties, Northern Gold is conducting exploration for additional gold mineralization outside those areas containing NI 43-101 compliant gold resources, as well as the development and expansion of gold mineralization in all resource categories within areas containing NI 43-101 compliant gold resources.
Diamond drilling is currently being undertaken by Asinii Drilling (Notre-Dame-Du-Nord) and N.P.L.H. drilling (Timmins). Asinii Drilling has 2 diamond drill rigs on the Jonpol Property and N.P.L.H has 1 drill on the Buffonta Property. Northern Gold has specified that all holes be collared using NQ-size core, which provides a good sample size. In areas of poor ground condition, the hole is collared with HQ-size core and downsized to NQ-size core below the problem area. In addition, the equipment must be capable of drilling a minimum distance of 700 meters downhole.
Sample security and chain of custody start with the removal of core from the core tube and boxing of drill core at each drill. The boxed core remains under the custody of the drillers until it is transported from the drill to the secure Core Shack facility by either the drill contractor or one of the Company’s designated personnel. At the Core Shack core boxes are opened and inspected to ensure correct boxing and labeling of the core by the drill contractors then re-closed. The core is stored securely at the company’s core processing facility until it is moved into the Core Shack for processing.
The core is marked and tagged for sampling and splitting. Sample lengths are normally one meter, unless there is a geological reason to shorten the sample interval. Core marked for splitting is split using a diamond core saw with a mounted jig to assure the core is split equally. One-half of the core is sent to an analytical laboratory for analysis. The remaining one-half of the core is retained and incorporated into the on-site core library and for any metallurgical test work that may be required. Duplicate samples are taken every 20th sample, each with its own unique sample number in order that all of Northern Gold’s duplicate are blind to the analytical laboratory. Duplicates alternate between pulp duplicates and core duplicates. Pulp duplicates are obtained by taking a second 300-gram riffle split from the crushed core, resulting in two 300-gram pulps from each sample interval selected for pulp duplicate analysis. Thirty-gram samples from each 300-gram pulp are assayed separately. Core duplicates are obtained by taking all of the remaining core from the selected sample interval and having it processed identically to the normal half-core samples. While using both core halves from the selected sample intervals does not leave any core in that interval for reference purposes, this procedure yields improved correlation between duplicate core samples as compared to using quarter-core duplicates, as was the previous practice.
In addition to duplicates, Northern Gold inserts blank samples and certified gold reference materials (or standards) at a rate of 5% of each sample type. Normally, four different gold reference materials are used and are randomly selected prior to insertion into the sample stream.
Chain of Custody protocols require the maintenance of tracking logs and receipts when samples are shipped from the Property, and when they are picked up from analysis laboratories and delivered to another laboratory or returned to the Property. When utilizing commercial transportation to ship from the Property, all shipping sacks are sealed with a numbered tag, the removal of which is recorded upon receipt by the receiving analytical laboratory.
Previous analyses were sent to Expert Laboratories, an accredited laboratory (PTP-MAL – Accredited by Standards Council of Canada – In full accord with ISO/IEC Guide 43-1 "Proficiency Testing by Interlaboratory Comparison”) in Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec and SGS Canada Inc. (“SGS”) a certified laboratory (ISO/IEC 17025), in Toronto, Ontario. As of February 15, 2013, samples are forwarded to Accurassay Laboratories in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
The Accurassay laboratory is accredited to the ISO 17025 by the Standards Council of Canada, Scope of Accreditation 434. For sample preparation, NGM requests that samples be crushed to -8 mesh after which a 1,000 g subset of each sample is pulverized to 90% passing -150 mesh. Assays are completed using a standard fire assay (FA) with a 30 g aliquot and an atomic absorption (AA) finish. For samples that return values of between 2 g/t Au and 5 g/t Au, another pulp is taken and fire assayed with a gravimetric finish. Samples returning values greater than 5 g/t Au are reanalyzed by pulp metallic analysis.
All samples are subject to a 33-element inductively coupled plasma (ICP) scan, Accurassay procedure ICP 580.
The technical aspects of these QA/QC Protocols have been reviewed and approved by Gary Nassif, M.Sc., P.Geo., Manager Exploration Services for Northern Gold Mining Inc., who is a “Qualified Person” as defined by NI 43-101 for the Golden Bear Project.
