ANCHORAGE — The Alaska Mental Health Trust Land Office is considering a heavy mineral prospect in Southeast Alaska.
The prospect would be at Icy Cape, a beach near Yakutat that the trust owns and that appears to hold deposits of heavy minerals including garnet, epidote and zircon, The Alaska Journal of Commerce reported.
Trust Land Office Executive Director John Morrison said there are enough heavy minerals at Icy Cape to run a major mine operation. He said because the minerals are literally grains in the beach sand, the 30 miles of coastline is a rich area for mineral mining.
“It’s difficult to quantify the value of (Icy Cape) in terms of heavy minerals; it’s just mind-boggling,” Morrison said. “There’s enough heavy minerals there to run a really large mine operation for over 100 years, and we’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars every year.”
Trust officials say preliminary resource evaluations show the beach has ore — or sand — with up to 40 percent heavy minerals. Specifically, the samples are roughly comprised of 20 percent epidote, 19 percent garnet and 0.5 percent zircon. It also contains gold concentrates of about 1.4 grams per metric ton.
Zircon and epidote are semiprecious gemstones. Garnet is also used as a gemstone, but recently has become a popular industrial abrasive on sandpapers and in sandblasting applications. Garnet can also be used in water filtration.
If Icy Cape begins mining, it would be the only source of garnet on the West Coast, Morrison said. “There’s all sorts of metrics and parameters that the buyers of those types of materials would want, and our garnets are the best you could have in terms of the size of the crystals and the way they’re fractured,” he said.
The trust is planning to conduct an airborne magnetic survey and collect bulk ore samples to further see what resources Icy Cape contains. In 2017, the plan is to drill any magnetic anomalies to find the high-grade, mineable zones. Morrison said that if all goes well, he expects small-scale production to begin in five to eight years.
The trust Land Office manages land across Alaska for resource development. The proceeds of the projects go to fund the Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority, which works to help state residents with mental health and addiction.
