Aurum hits sulphides in maiden drill campaign

Aurum Resources has intersected sulphides and quartz veining in recent drilling at its Penny South project targeting structural anomalies that bear similarities to the nearby high-grade Ramelius Resources owned Penny North deposit and the historical high-grade Penny West mine. Aurum is currently 5 holes into an 18 hole RC drill program for a total of 5,000 metres that is following up previous gold hits and new geophysical anomalies.

The current RC drill program is attempting to home in on the most prospective areas of the company’s Penny South tenure where priority geophysical structural targets have been identified.

Drilling is a third of the way through and is scheduled to take 6 weeks with almost 6 holes for 1218m of RC drilling completed to date.

Geology intersected so far has comprised of mafic and ultramafic schists, basalts and granodiorites. Trace levels of sulphides with quartz veining has been logged that show predominantly pyrite and galena within all five holes drilled to date.

A further 12 structural targets remain to be tested and are set to be completed over the next four weeks.

Penny South sits adjacent to and on the same shear structure as the Penny North deposit which was only recently discovered by Spectrum Resources in 2019 before it was taken out by Ramelius for around $400m. The Penny North deposit has been aggressively drilled since then and now houses a resource base of 620,000 tonnes grading a stellar 15 g/t gold for 300,000 ounces gold.

The historic Penny West open pit mine is also within stone’s throw - located a mere 510 metres to the north of Aurum’s Penny South project. Penny West was a high-grade deposit where 121,000 tonnes at 21.8 grams per tonne for 85,000 ounces gold was mined during the 1990’s.

The Penny West sheared contact that hosts the Penny West gold mine continues into the Penny South tenure for a total 2.5 kilometres of strike.

Previous notable drill results at Penny South, amongst a myriad of others, include 2m grading a formidable 33.89 g/t gold from 38m downhole and 4m going 2.1 g/t gold from 92m.

Mineralisation at Penny West and Penny North is contained within very narrow high-grade zones so the company argues the drill targeting must be highly focussed.

Historically Penny South has experienced a decent amount of drilling, however previous holes are generally shallow with an average depth of only around 40m. To put this into context, mineralisation at the Penny North deposit starts at 80m depth and continues to 320m.

Aurum is still fresh off the IPO press having only listed in November 2021 and with its coffers full of cash the company is wasting little time getting stuck into its high-priority targets at Penny West. Following a period of intense geophysical interpretation - the drill rig is now hammering away.

The Perth-based explorer now looks set for a news-filled 2022 as it gets stuck into the search for high-grade gold in a region that is famous for giving it up.

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