EAS continues ground work at Takengon and Barisan I

Vancouver-based mineral exploration firm East Asia Minerals Corporation (EAS) announced Friday that as a result of ongoing exploration at its several prospective land positions in Aceh Province, Northern Sumatra, it has advanced the Collins epithermal gold project at the Takengon Property, and the Upper Ise Ise porphyry gold-copper project at the Barisan I Property.

At the Collins epithermal gold project, new mapping and trenching along the previously reported gold trend have exposed additional gold-bearing quartz lodes within sandstone beneath the mudstone cap, and extended the gold mineralization in both strike directions. The Collins project is a large partially exposed multistage gold-bearing quartz vein swarm where East Asia previously reported channel samples of 11.0 metres at 22.20 g/t gold, and 11.0 metres at 14.99 g/t gold. At the nearby Semelit project, porphyry potential has also been indicated by supergene porphyry outcrops with +2% copper and +2 g/t gold.

This new work has increased definition of two sub-parallel lodes that have now been mapped and sampled over a 600 metres strike length. At least three main vein episodes have been identified in the lodes, comprising (i) coarse grained crystalline buck quartz devoid of sulphides, (ii) fine grained quartz + galena + chalcopyrite + sphalerite + pyrite +gold, and, (iii) crudely banded coarse chalcocite-quartz ? sulphides. All the gold reports to vein type ii.

Recent gold results include 7 metres at 10.12 g/t gold, 6.9 metres at 11.88 g/t gold, 5.3 metres at 1.07 g/t gold, 3 metres at 1.49 g/t gold, 1 metre at 29.2 g/t gold, 3 metres at 1.54g/t gold, 3 metres at 1.0 g/t gold, 2 metres at 5.2g/t gold, 7 metres at 14.8 g/t gold, 7 metres 6 g/t gold, 4 metres 0.37g/t gold, 3 metres at 0.76g/t gold, 4 metres at 2.29g/t gold, 4 metres at 2.96g/t gold, and 6.5 metres at 3.3g/t gold.

In addition, the Company has defined stratabound gold replacement potential at the Collins project, similar to the Company's nearby Abong property where it completed 130 drill holes along a flat-lying near-surface epithermal gold deposit. At Abong the Company has defined gold mineralization within a 3 by 1.5 kilometre corridor.

At the Upper Ise Ise gold-copper porphyry project (Barisan I Property), an initial diamond drill hole is planned to follow the Lower Tengkereng drill program, and will test a historic drill hole which intersected 0.27 g/t gold and 0.4% copper over 143 metres. The historic drill hole ended in mineralization directly beneath strong surface quartz vein stockwork, with the program terminated for non-technical reasons.

Ongoing exploration at Upper Ise Ise has defined surface gold and copper grades similar to drill holes at Upper and Lower Tengkereng, extensive surface stockwork development with abundance of chalcopyrite-chalcocite and bornite in outcrop, and high reduced-to-pole magnetic relief, a favourable indicator in many of the world's best gold-rich porphyry copper deposits in the circum-Pacific rim, it said.

EAS is an Asian-based, Canadian mineral exploration company with gold and copper exploration properties in Indonesia, and uranium exploration properties in Mongolia. In Indonesia the Company has a 70 to 85% interest in six advanced gold and gold-copper properties located in Aceh Province, Sumatra, and Sangihe Island, North Sulawesi. Two of these, the Sangihe (Binebase-Bawone) and Barisan 1 (Abong) gold projects, are being advanced to define NI43-101 compliant resources. (alex)