Minerals explorer Godolphin Resources is planning a drilling program to follow up fieldwork at the company’s Yeoval East prospect and further expand its resource footprint in the rich Lachlan Fold Belt in NSW’s central west region.
The company’s fieldwork comprised hand-auger soil and rock-chip sampling programs designed to provide it with a better understanding of the copper and gold mineralisation that was identified in the 1990s – and also to give pointers to its potential size.
Results from the programs identified a 150-plus parts per million copper zone about 600m long and 200m wide. Copper results ran up to 0.14 per cent from soil samples and 0.28 per cent copper from the rock chips.
Godolphin describes the results as “highly anomalous and significant” and says it is also pleased with “highly-elevated” gold values returned from the programs. Several small zones returned more than 50 parts per billion gold, with the highest gold-in-soil value reaching 0.30 grams per tonne. Management says the top gold figure for its rock chips was 0.81g/t.
The company’s current exploration program follows surface geological mapping, which located an undrilled area of outcropping visible secondary copper mineralisation, in addition to strong pervasive and vein-related epidote-chlorite-albite-sericite alteration.
Godolphin’s tenements cover 3200 square kilometres of ground on the Lachlan Transverse Zone. It is one of the key structures which controlled the formation of copper and gold deposits within the prolific Lachlan Fold Belt and is regarded as a premier bulk-tonnage gold and copper province in Australia. The fold stretches along an axis that almost touches Bourke in the north-west and extends past Canberra in the south-east.
Yeoval East is about 2km north of the Yeoval township and about 300km north-west of Sydney. More pertinently, it is 700m east of an existing mineral resource estimate at the company’s Yeoval resource of 12.8 million tonnes going 0.38 per cent copper, 0.14g/t gold, 2.2g/t silver and 120ppm molybdenum.
The surface-sampling program was completed to determine the size of the copper and gold anomalism and to investigate north-west-trending structures identified in the company’s recent high-resolution ground magnetics program. Management says is particularly interested in locating fractures – a potential key to unlocking copper-gold porphyries because they can act as a conduit for mineralising fluids.
Godolphin Resources managing director Jeneta Owens said: “The Yeoval East Prospect along with nearby Cyclops and Goodrich Prospects are compelling copper and gold targets which Godolphin will follow-up in 2023. The recent surface sample results from the Yeoval East Prospect are testament to the effectiveness of grass roots exploration methods, such as geological mapping, to identify copper and gold mineralisation in a terrain that has been explored previously. Drill target planning is currently underway. When this is finalised, we intend to mobilise a rig to site and follow up these targets to further expand our resource footprint in the Lachlan Fold Belt.”
Godolphin notes that in the 1990s, a shallow drilling and small surface sampling program identified copper and gold mineralisation near its recently-identified areas of interest. But no systematic follow-up exploration was undertaken.
Six shallow reverse-circulation (RC) holes were drilled at Yeoval East in a 1994 campaign by another company, but only to 72m. One of the holes that did report copper and gold mineralisation was drilled in the opposite direction to the zone of anomalous copper identified in Godolphin’s soil and rock-chip sampling program.
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By Mark Irving
