Aruma Resources is chasing more high-grade gold with a multi-hole diamond drilling program at its Salmon Gums project in Western Australia following previous campaigns where the company discovered bonanza grades of up to 224 grams per tonne of gold.
The project is in the same stratigraphy and 30km south of Pantoro’s Scotia project, which has a mineral resource of 1 million ounces of gold and an ore reserve of 535,000 ounces.
The company’s 100 per cent-held Salmon Gums project – comprising two exploration licences and a third under application and covering some 360 square kilometres – sits 60km south of Norseman. It had been previously overlooked by other explorers as part of the less-prospective Albany-Fraser zone, but is now firmly within the Yilgarn craton and its characteristic gold-bearing greenstones.
Aruma Resources managing director Glenn Grayson said: “Salmon Gums is certainly an important project with the key being the unlocking of the high grade Norseman style gold mineralisation. This drilling program will certainly allow us to understand the bonanza intersection from 2022 and to improve the geology model for further work.”
The company has kicked off the new diamond drilling campaign, which will comprise seven drillholes with differing orientations designed to fully understand the high-grade gold mineralisation extent and controls. The program includes one hole which will “twin” an earlier reverse-circulation (RC) hole that assayed 5m at 50.2g/t gold. Another north-south hole will test for the presence of flat lodes of Norseman-style gold mineralisation, which could add materially to the resource.
The drilling is expected to be completed by the end of this month, with assay results to follow. Once the results are compiled, further extensional drilling is planned around the Thistle discovery.
Aruma's current campaign is the culmination of previous drilling episodes, with each one extending its gold footprint and providing encouragement to further delineate the gold resource. In total, 116 drillholes for 11,609m have been drilled at Salmon Gums.
The last phase of drilling involved 44 RC drillholes for 5366m and shallow auger soil sampling for 894 samples. The RC drilling intersected multiple anomalous gold zones at the company’s priority Iris and Thistle targets and discovered a new prospect, Rose.
Thistle's best assayed figures are 1m at 1.7g/t from 6m, 1m at 3g/t from 71m at Iris and 1m at 2.3g/t from 27m at Rose.
The soil-sampling program indicated strong gold prospectivity with elevated gold and arsenic anomalies, in addition to rare earths in the form of cerium and lanthanum being present.
It now seems just a matter of time before Aruma proves up its high-grade gold resource at Salmon Gums as it relentlessly pursues the bonanza that it believes awaits the drillbit. The rare earths adjuncts add to the glamour.
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By Gary Kjellgren
