The Chaarat Property is located at latitude 42°1’12” N and longitude 71°9’84” E in the Sandalash Range of the Alatau Mountains in the Chatkal district of the Jalal Abad oblast (province) of western Kyrgyzstan, close to the border with Uzbekistan and approximately 327km southwest of the Kyrgyzstan capital, Bishkek.
From Bishkek, the Chaarat Property is accessible by a combination of 520 km of paved and unpaved roads, of which 185 km are gravel. Travel time from the capital city to the Chaarat camp is in the order of 10 to 12 hours via the northern road which is closed between the end of October and early June. There is an alternative southern access into the Chatkal valley through the town of Jany-Bazar at the intersection of the Chatkal River and the Sandalash River. From the national road a dedicated 25 km road leads to the site over a mountain pass at 3,250 metres.
The Chaarat Project is located in a mountainous area along the Sandalash River valley, on the western border of the Kyrgyz Republic. The valley marks the north-easterly trending hinge zone of an anticline, the north-western limb of which consists of a sequence of Upper Proterozoic and Cambrian-Ordovician siliciclastic rocks - the Chaarat formation, which dips at around 400 northwest. The formation comprises greywacke, sandstone with siltstone, shale, rhythmically bedded siltstone and black shale with limestone lenses and an upper tillite.
This stratigraphy is disrupted by several NE-SW trending oblique-slip faults and by a major thrust dislocation which brings the Devonian age Tulkubash Formation quartzites and Carboniferous age carbonate rocks into contact with the Chaarat formation, some 500 to 600 metres above the Sandalash River. The siltstones show an irregular axial planar fabric that locally becomes intense.
Permian-Triassic age syenite and diorite have intruded along many of the faults. Other intrusive rocks includes small cross cutting granites bodies and post tectonic mafic dykes. The diorite dykes seem to be closely related to mineralization and in some areas their contacts are mineralised. Skarn mineralogy, pyroxene and garnet, is locally present along the diorite contacts.
The mineralised zones exhibit pervasive sericitic alteration with lesser amounts of quartz, ankerite and calcite gangue. There is limited oxidation near surface and arsenopyrite and stibnite are locally visible in surface outcrops. In some areas, antimony (Sb) and silver are significant constituents of mineralisation, the latter particularly in the Contact Zone (about 21 g/t Ag average) and in M7000 (Karator). Antimony, in stibnite and various sulfosalts, can locally reach values of 10% or more over one to two metre thick zones. Copper and Molybdenum are rarely significant constituents of the mineralisation.