The BarkerLetter

First Nickel Inc (FNI.TSX) gained a few cents today on news of a significant discovery on the north range of the Sudbury Basin in Canada’s Ontario province.

I’ve always liked Sudbury, partly because of a very interesting theory about its formation. Scientists believe a meteorite hit the region countless eons ago, turning a portion of the earth’s mantle inside out and creating rivers of exposed magma which formed minerals. To date, some 30 economic polymetallic orebodies have been discovered there.

FNI has some good ground there, snatched from Falconbridge before the world’s second largest nickel producer went on the block and got sold to Xstrata plc. Yesterday they reported intriguing but not earth shaking grades from a preliminary drill program at the Morgan-Lumsden Property, located approximately 12 kilometres east of Xstrata’s Strathcona Mill Complex.

The junior thinks it’s onto something big and so does Xstrata, which claims to have intercepted a new embayment feature developing along the basal contact of the Sudbury Igneous Complex into the footwall lithologies. Translation: There are striking geological similarities with Sudbury’s biggest copper/nickel deposits.

“When combined with the broad intercept of nickel-copper sulphide mineralization and the strong off-hole anomalies, the exploration results all indicate the potential of a new, significant, contact style mineralized system,” explained Exploration VP Paul Davis.

Contact style mineralization often hosts large, multiple orebodies.

“Many recent discoveries in Sudbury were identified by deep searching geophysical survey methods but are related with an existing ‘embayment feature’ that has been traced down plunge through historic workings from much shallower depths. The Morgan-Lumsden embayment feature has no such known surface expression and represents a totally new mineralized embayment structure within the North Range of the Sudbury Basin”.

Translation: They’re in uncharted waters, elephant country.

The exploration results are extremely encouraging and have prompted First Nickel to accelerate the exploration program.

Drilling currently underway approximately 80 metres to the south-southwest will be completed in April to a final depth of 1,500 metres.

First Nickel has the producing Lockerby Mine plus four exploration properties in Sudbury and two in the gold rich Timmins region of northern Ontario. It is fully listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange where it trades at just over $1 Cdn per share.

Hang around, folks. This could get interesting indeed.