Neil Briggs $PLY RKV Project on Google Earth #NorwayMining

Read the transcript from my hour-long interview discussing the RKV exploration project in Norway.

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Peter Bell: Hello, I'm Peter Bell and I'm here with Nr. Neil Briggs of Playfair Mining. Hello Neil!

Neil Briggs: Hello Peter. How are you good?

Peter Bell: Well, thanks. Nice to be talking to you. We talked once before a few months ago about Playfair and the plan of attack. We've had results out since then and they've been surprising.

Neil Briggs: Surprisingly good!

Peter Bell: Yes, and we have a new version of the presentation deck on the website here. I'll jump to the last page of it, which shows specifically what we're talking about -- 50,000 parts per billion in a soil sample.

Neil Briggs: Right. That's an MMI reading of 53,300 parts per billion in a soil sample, which is one of the highest MMI readings ever recorded in the 20 years that MMI has been going. And the results are consistent -- there are 19 or 20 consistently high copper readings there. The people who developed MMI tell me that any values over 6,000 parts per billion copper are likely to be directly above weathering copper sulphides. This is a place that's not been explored before. Its pristine country out in the bush, no habitations, nothing around.

Peter Bell: But it's in a historic mining district.

Neil Briggs: Yes, it is in a historic mining district. It is seven kilometres south of an old mine, the ROSTVANGEN mine. This specific area has not been explored, although it's been explored a bit on the high ground and there are a couple of small showings. On the slopes going down to the string of glacial lakes, it is all covered with the glacial till and there's no outcrop. This anomaly popped up in that area and there's nothing to be seen when you're there in the field.

Peter Bell: Let's zoom in on the specific area here. STORBOREN, the big hill.

Neil Briggs: This only shows the first pass MMI. We have done more detailed work to fill-in the geochemistry in addition to the results you have here. Nonetheless, you can see those three big yellow dots in the foreground of your picture here on Google Earth -- those were our first indications of STORBOREN. The highest number we got on our initial pass when we discovered this area was 48,400 per billion copper, which is 355x background.

Neil Briggs: Subsequently, we did detailed work in the area and defined the anomaly. It's still open along the length. Now, the highest number is 53,500 in that immediate area.

Peter Bell: Please let me dig up the other infill MMI soil sampling data to add those additional results. As you were saying, it is downslope in an area with a fair amount of cover and really on the edge of one of the CARDS target anomalies. Again, it is very encouraging to see consistently high readings on the copper relative to background.

Neil Briggs: That's another 40,000 result. There are some very high numbers. You can see on the length of the anomaly that it's still open to the northwest and southeast. It can still continue between the sampling lines we've done so far. When we did the follow-up work, there was snow on the ground -- just a few inches, but we were lucky to get back in and get done as much as we did.

Peter Bell: Now, I remember that there was mention of the possibility of getting some sense of lithology from the full set of 52 elements or whatever it is that we have here. Any comment on that?

Neil Briggs: Yes. I have done some work on that. Basically, we've defined an amphibolite unit, which strikes up just east of north -- heading up towards the old mine at ROSTVANGEN. This mineralization looks as though it's a plunging lens leading from this amphibolite units.

Neil Briggs: The amphibolite units is defined by the MMI being high in magnesium, calcium, nickel, and low in aluminum. It hangs together very nicely and makes a pretty pattern -- you can believe it when you see it. I can send it to you.

Peter Bell: Thanks, I appreciate all the different layers of information you've sent me so far. Maybe I'll turn on the geophysics here to show people what that looks like.

Neil Briggs: That's the mag. You can see how the mag is defining a trend of amphibolites, heading up towards the east-northeast. That trend indicates the trend of amphibolites and the ROSTVANGEN mine is on that trend, just before you get up to the road that you can see in the middle. It's right on that same trend. You can see a CARDS targets in red there and a line running straight up and down through the CARDS target, down to the bottom of the hill. At the bottom is where the old mill is located and that line you can see was the old tram line. The mine was higher up the hill than the CARDS target. If you if you move up there and look more vertically, then you can see the mill and the tram line going through the CARDS target. It comes to a small lake and you can see all this brown color -- that's the old mine.

Peter Bell: Always risky to search for these things in Google Earth without a marker.

Neil Briggs: We have not tested that CARDS target yet.

Peter Bell: Was that an access issue, mainly?

Neil Briggs: We weren't sure of the access in the area and we had 24 other targets to go, so we decided to look at it later. That's a target for this summer.

Peter Bell: Absolutely. Over here on that hill that continues up-slope seem to be a pretty interesting area. Seems like there were some old workings over there.

Neil Briggs: Yes. Over where it says BORSJOHOGRUVA, there is some kind of deposit. It is in a protected area of some sort. You can work in there, but it's kind of protected landscape area. You can get permission to go in there, but it takes some effort. Since we have so many targets anyway, we decided not to.

Peter Bell: I'll put on the magnetics again to show this. It's very interesting to think that you'd have a mine located at this area with a relatively small magnetic response.

Neil Briggs: Yes, it's kind of on a finger that comes off the main magnetic response. It's in a folded piece if amphibolite that goes out. You don't have to necessarily be right on the main highway of magnetics, so to speak.

Peter Bell: It gives you a sense for the large search space that you had starting off with this project and the impact that CARDS had narrowing it down for you. And then to point out that the STORBOREN here was really on the edges of that magnetic high.

Neil Briggs: Yes, and we still don't know much about the geology yet.

Peter Bell: Great spot for access. The road right there is great to see.

Neil Briggs: Yes, and there's a trail that comes in very close too.

Peter Bell: And there's no historic mine workings around STORBOREN.

Neil Briggs: No, there's nothing. Up on top of the hills, there are some small showings. But no sign of any work.

Peter Bell: And the lakes here -- reading into the science behind MMI and some of the experiments they've done to figure out these mobile metal ions, it seems like water plays a pretty big role.

Neil Briggs: Usually with water traveling vertically. These are these are glacial lakes and this was a big glacial overflow during the retreat of the glaciers about 12,000 years ago.

Peter Bell: So, those aren't particularly deep? No real indications of deeper lines of weakness or faulting around there and water moving around at depth?

Neil Briggs: No, but it's covered with fairly thick glacial debris when you get in the valley. It's hard to know what's in there, Peter.

Peter Bell: Thank you very much. I'll turn off the mag here and take another gamble to see if I can find KVIKNE.

Neil Briggs: That's way up at the north end. There you can see KVIKNE mine. And there's an old showing over on the creek you can see there. We have very good target on that grid. We have some good responses on that grid nearest to KVIKNE, within about a kilometre. It's clearly a place for follow-up.

Peter Bell: It seemed like the cobalt numbers were a little bit higher.

Neil Briggs: Cobalt and copper -- a little bit silver. And there is one very high nickel, too.

Peter Bell: I'll admit I had high hopes for this area off to the northeast of KVIKNE here with these nickel sulphide targets. We're just looking at the copper response here.

Neil Briggs: There are some copper numbers on a couple of those grids right on the river, but not a great deal else up in there. The geology looks interesting. The mag is quite interesting, it looks like it's folded somehow. See that fold in the brighter area? But we didn't get an awful lot in our MMI work there.

Peter Bell: Comparing it with that historic mine down by STORBOREN and thinking that you don't have to have a screaming high mag response.

Neil Briggs: Yes. Although, if you look were KVIKNE is, it's right on the north end of that high. Hard to know exactly but between KVIKNE and our nearest grid, you can see there are other workings in there. There's quite decent mineralization around them. They weren't mined, but they went underground exploring there. And there is another showing closer to our grid than those old workings -- in between those two longer lines there's a showing, but there's not very much work there.

Peter Bell: That's KVIKNE. Then, is it for VAKKERLIEN that was the nickel sulphide?

Neil Briggs: Yes, it's the middle grid -- the one you have centered now. There is a showing there. There was a copper showing found there around the turn of the century -- 1900, that century. When Falconbridge were working around KVIKNE, they went in and sampled that showing on the very last day of their field season in 1974. By the time they got the assay results from that sample, which was a copper showing, the snow was on the ground and they couldn't go back. But that sample at KVIKNE came back as a 2% nickel! They started finding nickel and they chased that a long way. On the bottom end of that grid, I think you can see the showing -- maybe you can see the dump somewhere around there. It's right around there.

Peter Bell: I had a hard time figuring out what was what around here, but it seems like there are more workings in this area.

Neil Briggs: There are some pits on the showing.

Neil Briggs: And neat to see your lines in the area with plant cover again. We are just off the end of where the showing is located. The showing goes on -- it dips down and goes on for about 1,200 metres. They drilled it for about 1,200 metres.

Peter Bell: Looking at the topography here and thinking about what could be going on geologically, looks like a nice area with a fair amount of rock exposure.

Neil Briggs: It's different geology than what you get in the copper areas, like KVIKNE and ROSTVANGEN. The geology is somewhat different here. The mag looks very different here -- not much. It's very different. It has a different magnetic domain of some kind.

Peter Bell: Run some IP or electromagnetics over it and you might find more response?

Neil Briggs: They've tried most of that stuff and haven't really got much responses.

Peter Bell: Okay! Is it a case of the lines being too coarse or something like that?

Neil Briggs: I don't know, but they have not got good responses over of VAKKERLIEN, which is the central one of those three you have there.

Peter Bell: I won't turn on all the the nickel numbers here, but I will show the Norwegian Geological Survey's records for different occurrences. There's VAKKERLIEN. The blue dots are the copper ones and the few in green are the nickel ones.

Neil Briggs: You see those two green ones there -- the one you've just clicked on now is called KALTBERGET. It's up on the side of a fairly steep hill, just the other side front of the hill from KVIKNE. Yes, Falconbridge drilled about 12 holes in there and there are nickel occurrences. We did get high nickel just off the west side of the grid there. You can actually see the showings on that one if you look there -- just off the edge of our grid there's a brown area and that's one of the showings. The CARDS target was there and we thought we' check up the hill from it. There's one showing there and another in that open ground down in the bottom left corner, Peter. These bits of brown are showings. Geology -- I don't know if the airborne shows much. I have ground mag and that does show a bit. You can't see much on the airborne mag, but there is a response. At this one, there are some numbers and we will do a little more work there but there's been a fair bit of drilling and I don't really think it can be very big. It's just an indication of those things around.

Peter Bell: Again, talking about the topography here and looking at that hill -- I wonder about movement of things post mineralization? Things could be re-oriented in a bunch of different ways.

Neil Briggs: The mineralization dips into the hill.

Peter Bell: Not necessarily a priority exploration target at this point, then. Thinking about that in terms of mine-ability or ability to drill holes in there -- but if you can find high grades then maybe there's room for an underground mining scenario.

Neil Briggs: We will do some more work in there, but it's not top priority.

Peter Bell: We've just talked about the K and the V. The R, my memory is failing me...

Neil Briggs: ROSTVANGEN is the first one we talked about. It is 7 kilometres north of our high anomaly at STORBOREN -- the one we looked at that up on the hill with the tram line.

Yes, and we've got it right there. That line, the old dumps, and the mill -- it's amazing that you can see the old buildings. Yes, you can see the old mill and all the foundations. There are still walls standing at the old mill, which is higher up the hill towards the trees at the end of the switchback. Lower down, you just see the foundations of the buildings.

Peter Bell: Thank you, I recall seeing those pictures and not knowing where they were.

Neil Briggs: The one that's still standing is the old mill. They brought it down that tramline, milled it there, and then trucked it off afterwards. 

Peter Bell: You mentioned a showing that was on the hill to the north of STORBOREN.

Neil Briggs: Yes, there are one or two showings around. None of them sound exciting in themselves, but they're generally indicative that this is a favorable area.

Peter Bell: Looking at this area again around STORBOREN, thinking about drilling and what next, I appreciate the in-fill MMI soils to increase the confidence on that response. That was a high impact program. We can toggle those on and off to see that was not a one-off right. Very important. Thoughts on mobilization plan of attack for drilling?

Neil Briggs: Finance, then drill. The other thing we have to do is chase up other targets -- we have another 14 or 15 targets that showed up. They are not as strong as this, but when you go back in and do some detailed work they may end up as strong.

Peter Bell: It's a testament to the methodology. I remember at PDAC2019 hearing about this plan and thinking it was smart. Glad to see it bear some fruit! And to give a discrete target helps. Thinking about these VMS deposit types -- the tonnage and scale required. We're looking here at 20 metre bars on this map.

Neil Briggs: Remember that MMI only detects mineralization that comes up to surface of the bedrock. Typically, these things in this area plunge down at a shallow angle and you can follow them for a very long way. For example, VAKKERLIEN was followed for 1.2 kilometres. There is a deposit not not far away in this same geology, probably 50-60 kilometres away on the other side of a big regional fold, called the KILLINGDAL. That was followed down-plunge for more than three kilometres.

Peter Bell: That one's pretty impressive. I've got that marked on a Google Map.

Neil Briggs: It's probably 60 kilometres away, but it's the same geology. Same kind of mineralization. The surface expression is similar. And they followed it down-plunge for over three kilometres, at which point it was about one kilometre deep. It's a fairly shallow plunge and they followed it underground.

Peter Bell: Vertical holes can be pretty effective.

Neil Briggs: Yes, initially until we get a feeling for what the geometry of the mineralization will be. We're confident there is some kind of mineralization here, but we don't know what kind. We have lots of room. The red line you're seeing is not the property limits or anything, the red line is just the limits of the CARDS anomaly. You have the property lines on this as black lines. We've got a long way to go and we're not constricted at all in space.

Peter Bell: Glad to see you stake this block to the south, as well.

Neil Briggs: As soon as we got this anomaly, we protected ourselves with these three extra blocks. They extend for five kilometres to the south.

Peter Bell: And it's diamond drilling, I guess? There's no sense of some scout RC stuff here.

Neil Briggs: I want diamond drilling. I want to see the rock. RC is all well and good, but you don't see the structures in the rock. The geometry of this will be structurally-controlled, so we need to see that because we don't see any rock there. As you can see, it is kind of in the trees.

Peter Bell: Do you have a sense for depth of cover?

Neil Briggs: Well, there is outcrop on top of the hill. My guess is that it's like five metres or something. That's an old trail you can see there in the foreground, by the way. That runs out to the road. I think it'll probably be five metres. I'd be shocked if it's much more.

Peter Bell: Thank you for indulging me with some Google Earth views. It's been a treat building up some Google Earth maps publicly and everything for the company to share online. Back to the pitch deck, as you said, finance and drill!

Neil Briggs: On this slide, you can see the anomaly. Looking straight down on it, you can see we can extend the length of it. Those black dots are our actual MMI samples and it's not cut off. And this other image gives you a sense for it in 3D and how strong the anomaly looks.

Peter Bell: I appreciate that it's in a pretty gentle location, topography-wise. This whole approach of geophysics, CARDS, and then MMI is repeatable. You've done it at a few of these targets, but there's more. And there are ones that deserve follow-up.

Neil Briggs: To use CARDS, you have to have enough information and we did in this case. That slide is an excerpt from the short report done by SGS, which was actually written by Alan Mann who was one of the two developers of MMI in the first place.

Peter Bell: Amazing that he would have a chance to see new highs in a way from results here.

Neil Briggs: He was quite thrilled when he saw them. I was talking to him and he was quite happy. He's in Australia.

Peter Bell: It's nice to see a few of these hotspots on different lines. It seems like its clustered right around STORBOREN, but there are some of these hot responses to the southwest and off to the northeast.

Neil Briggs: Yes. You can see anything in red there is above 6,000 and if you read his comments then there are 14 values over 6,000 in this particular area. Many, if not all of these, are likely to be associated with weathering copper sulphides.

Peter Bell: It's a great example of the science. I always appreciate this as a great example of new exploration methods.

Neil Briggs: It's a novel combination that people haven't used. We're confident we found mineralization. We don't know how much yet. That's what drilling is for!

Peter Bell: To ask about this area we're looking around STORBOREN from the northwest to southeast -- comparing that area with deposits that were mined elsewhere nearby. You mentioned the great vertical extent, what about the higher grade domains? How wide do they typically extend at surface?

Neil Briggs: At ROSTVANGEN, there are 2 main trends and the two together would be about two hundred metres. Along the strike length, each of them will be around 75 metres -- that would be a comparable thing to what we're seeing at STORBOREN, measuring along the geological strike.

Peter Bell: And it looked like these are 500 metre bars.

Neil Briggs: Yes, and those lines are 100 metres apart. We see a group of lines that are 100 metres apart and the samples are 25 metres apart, along the line.

Peter Bell: Is there anything to say that you might get a cluster of a few of these 200 metre deposits?

Neil Briggs: Typically you do with VMS type things. Typically you do, but this is such early stage that it's all to play for yet.

Peter Bell: I love it. Thank you, Neil. I'll just scroll through another few slides.

Neil Briggs: Here you can see all the other hits we've got. Each one of those red stars are values more than 50x background. Everything in that table is at least one sample with one element that is more than 50x background. And we've only followed up on the one so far. All the others are to do.

Peter Bell: Any more thinking on the cobalt or the nickel sulphides?

Neil Briggs: These type of copper deposits typically have some cobalt with them. More often where the copper deposits than with the nickel. We've got a couple of nickel targets, as you can see. One of them on Grid 8 is 213x background. It's right on the edge of the grid. There's cobalt nearby, which is that 105x cobalt reading just a couple rows down. There's a 60x cobalt as well. That 60x cobalt, the 105x cobalt, and the 213x nickel are all close together on Grid 8.

Neil Briggs: Here is Grid 8 on Google Earth. You can seen the copper here. The dot down at the south end is copper. The nickel and cobalt is right up at the other end. There's the 213x nickel response ratio. The nickel is there and the cobalt is right around there, too. Right on the end of the grid in the trees -- we know nothing.

Peter Bell: What an area with that cliff. Erosion and all these things like to follow these lines of weakness, right? The nickel sulphide, that's a different genetic model than the VMS?

Neil Briggs: Most likely.

Peter Bell: And the nickel sulphides would be more related to these structural features?

Neil Briggs: Could be. We really don't know much about this yet. We have to extend that grid at that end. We have to extend it at the other end for the copper, too.

Neil Briggs: There's a long cliff that is some kind of geological structure. And you can see people live down in the valley where it's flat and you can farm.

Peter Bell: But up in the woods is where they've been mining for years!

Neil Briggs: Since 1632 at KVIKNE.

Peter Bell: Which is just underneath us here.

Neil Briggs: If you turn the mag on from here, then you'll see the general trend goes that way.

Peter Bell: Interesting to think about the regional geology and that you might get better at having a targeting method for these nickel sulphide things. It seems like they've been a bit elusive, not just to you to Falconbridge before.

Peter Bell: And this slide shows the CARDS target areas that we've been looking at on Google Earth.

Neil Briggs: The one marked B is the one close to the ROSTVANGEN mine that we did not follow up on because we weren't sure of the land situation.

Peter Bell: Targets waiting for more work.

Neil Briggs: And that Grid 8 we just looked at was in that Group 2.

Peter Bell: I appreciate all the info on how did the MMI, simple and effective. I wonder how to compare the efficacy of MMI versus different types of soil sampling? I guess this is more sensitive.

Neil Briggs: It's different in that MMI travels vertically upward from oxidizing sulphides. These ions come right to surface, vertically above them. There's good and bad in the way that works. With normal soils in places with glaciation, the soils might have been moved by glaciers over kilometres. Even if you get a soil anomaly, you've got to try to understand how the soil got there and trace it back. The advantage of MMI is that the soils are just a medium that the MMI passes through -- it doesn't matter where the soil comes from. The bad side of it is that because it just goes up vertically, it just sits right on top of where the oxidizing sulphides are located. When you get soils spread out from a glacier over several kilometres, you have a bigger target. You don't know where it come from, but you can try to trace that target back to where it came from.

Peter Bell: That's apparent when you look at the response here around STORBOREN. The fact that you can have these hot soil numbers right here and then, 100 metres away, it's dead.

Neil Briggs: You don't have the dispersion. But you also don't have to try to figure out where the soils came from because it doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter what type of soil it is, as long as it's a mineral soil -- not organics. You have to dig down through the organics. Once you get through that surface organic layer, whether it's a brown a typical B horizon or a gray glacial clay -- it doesn't matter. But it does matter in the normal soils, you need to be sampling the same kind of stuff all the time. We do too, but the "same kind of stuff" means mineral soils not organics.

Peter Bell: And the high sensitivity -- part per billion level.

Neil Briggs: People say, "Well, you've got a very low level anomaly -- it's only 53,000." But the background number in the area is only 137.

Peter Bell: Hence, the significance of these ratios. The response ratios and all the statistics that goes along with this. I saw mention of some kriging methods there in Alan Mann's report and I wonder all the fun they have with the data.

Neil Briggs: There's lots of things you can do with it. It's a lot of data as each sample is analyzed for 52 elements. There's lots you can do with it.

Peter Bell: I appreciate this picture on the left -- looks like the skyline on STORBOREN.

Neil Briggs: That photo was taken at ROSTVANGEN. You can see there's a brown area, roughly in the central -- that's where the mine is located.

Peter Bell: Appreciate all the science on the MMI and all the background on the project. You've done a good job explaining it to the people. Credit to EMX for putting together this land package in the first place and making it available for option. Well done.

Neil Briggs: We moved along pretty quickly.

Peter Bell: Here we are a week away from PDAC 2020. I invite everybody to come and seek you out at that event.

Neil Briggs: We will be there booth 2353.

Peter Bell: Always a busy spot. I've run into all kinds of good people there. You guys are well-liked from in the business what I've seen. It's great to see.

Neil Briggs: What we have here is an interpretation of the MMI results in the STORBOREN area. We can see in red the defined copper anomaly. The values in red are more than 6,000 parts per billion MMI copper. We've already looked at the topography and see that topography slopes down to the valley as indicated by the green arrows. The blue arrow is showing the ice direction -- the regional ice direction. The last glacial direction, in this case, was pushing everything uphill because it was coming from a big regional ice cap over by the border with Sweden that was pushing out to the ocean.

Neil Briggs: The other thing you're seeing on here is a green area. This is what I interpret as being amphibolite or mafic to ultramafic rocks, which are the probable host rock for the mineralization. On the MMI, this shows as high magnesium, high calcium, high nickel, and low aluminum. This is a quick visual representation to show you the strike of the rocks, which coincides with the strike of the geophysics -- the magnetics goes this way. The mapped geology goes the way of the green and up to ROSTVANGEN 7km away. This is an example of some of the things you can do trying to interpret what rocks are around using MMI.

Peter Bell: Thank you. The factor that you're looking at there with high magnesium, high calcium, high nickel, and low aluminium is indicating the rock.

Neil Briggs: Yes, it's an amphibolite rock type, I believe.

Peter Bell: We talked about depth to bedrock and depth of cover, but the do you have a sense for the depth of the rock type? Is that just the top of bedrock? No sense of dip or plunge?

Neil Briggs: No, they are just coming vertically up.

Peter Bell: That would be asking a lot, but it's impressive to be able to identify this particular factor with this particular combination of elements as giving you some sense of targeting on the volcanics. Thank you. Do you have a sense for what the neighboring rocks are? Around the volcanics here, is the country rock some kind of a granite?

Neil Briggs: No, they are sediments -- shales, sandstones.

Peter Bell: Right, that makes sense with the VMS. Thank you.

Neil Briggs: That is typical of the Besshi-type VMS.

Peter Bell: Well done! It's interesting to see in this diagram how the edge of the STORBOREN anomaly is sharp on the southern side.

Neil Briggs: And you can see how it's open at each end because there's no samples. The MMI samples are marked in black dots.

Peter Bell: Helpful when it comes to targeting for drilling, isn't it!

Neil Briggs: Yes. Given that it's coming vertically, you can just sit on top of it and drill vertically down.

Peter Bell: Wonderful. Thank you very much. I'd heard mention of being able to have some sense of rock types at depth based on MMI and I'd wondered what that looked like -- this is it! These combination of different elements other than the copper, nickel, or cobalt.

Neil Briggs: Magnesium, calcium, aluminum are all representing rock-forming elements.

Peter Bell: Is that a useful exercise to repeat at other areas?

Neil Briggs: I will be repeating that exercise with the same factors, but remember that it works better here because we've done that detail. We've done a big grid and then filled it in. Without that in-fill, we only had two or three numbers that would indicate mafic to ultramafic rocks. It's a function of how our sampling is done.

Peter Bell: Sparse data points with these first-pass programs, but then you come back and do in-fill on the hot areas and the confidence goes up! Well done. Thank you again. Let's bring it to a close here. Thank you very much, Neil.

Neil Briggs: Thanks, Peter.

Please note that I run the Playfair Mining twitter account and produced this video as background information. Contact the company at [email protected] or 1-604-687-7178.

Find the KMZ files used in this video here, https://drive.google.com/open?id=1JxUxqP7kMYbGxmvzdqVsAfklT4BrW3kN