Aruma snaps up more ground in Pilbara gold hunt

Aruma Resources has built on its already enviable ground position at the Saltwater gold project on the southern margin of WA’s emerging Pilbara goldfield. The company has added three new exploration licences to the project with its tenure now covering over 65km of highly prospective and under-explored stratigraphy.

The company’s new leases lie adjacent to its existing tenure at Saltwater and overlie the extensions to the auriferous Nanjilgardy Fault, a crustal scale feature that also hosts Northern Star’s Paulsen’s gold mine and Kalamazoo’s Mt Olympus gold deposits to the west.

The region has already proven its pedigree as a first-class address, particularly with Paulsen’s, which is where it all began for mega miner, Northern Star.

The Saltwater gold project covers more than 730 square kilometres and is located only 100km southwest of the mining centre of Newman.

Preliminary exploration over the Saltwater area has identified a number of priority targets for exploration, with large alteration zones and quartz veining having been identified during initial field work at the Monster, Saltwater and Black Hill prospects.

The company is looking to complete initial mapping and sampling over these highly prospective gold targets in the coming weeks before launching into drilling later in the field season.

Aruma’s innovative move into the Pilbara comes on the back of a strategic review and consolidation of the company’s assets at the end of 2019. Its pivot away from a predominantly Eastern Goldfield’s focus and into the emerging Pilbara terrane is largely the brainchild of the company’s Managing Director and veteran geologist, Peter Schwann. 

Mr Schwann said:

“We have to be in underexplored areas with known gold, strong structures, reactive rock types intruded by hot granites and have the potential for multi-million-ounce gold discoveries.”

At face value, the region seems to tick all of Schwann’s boxes with a host of innovative explorers leading the way in the fertile terrane including Novo Resources with its vast conglomerate gold deposits, De Grey Mining with the multi-million-ounce Hemi discovery in the northern Pilbara and now Aruma looking to join the party.

Aruma now boasts two key project areas over the Nanjilgardy Fault on the southern margin of the Pilbara. Whilst the Saltwater project covers the eastern extents of the regional fault, the Melrose gold project covers a strategic position around Northern Star’s incubator operation at Paulsen’s.

The Melrose project covers close to 200 square kilometres of granted exploration tenure and hosts a number of Paulsen’s look-alike targets, including the Gossan Hill prospect and the yet-to-be-named target areas along the Nanjilgardy Fault itself. Melrose looks set to be the next cab off the rank once exploration kicks off over the Saltwater project.

Aruma still retains two of its project areas in the Eastern Goldfield’s, including the Scotia South project south of Kalgoorlie and the Slate Dam project to the east of the mining centre. The company has also recently acquired the Capital gold project in the Lachlan Fold Belt of New South Wales, which is also really hotting up given Alkane’s amazing recent copper-gold discovery in that region.

With a strategic ground holding over the auriferous fault system at Saltwater and large alteration systems already identified on the ground, Aruma looks poised to jump into exploration in the coming weeks as the company dives head-first into this potential company making terrane on the southern margin of the Pilbara.

Is your ASX listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au