Great Southern Mining has identified an impressive eight new target areas at its northern Goldfields Cox’s Find project courtesy of a 100 metre by 50 metre grid of shallow RAB holes drilled across most of the company’s ground holdings. The drilling has identified multiple gold anomalous zones, some with concentrations exceeding one gram per tonne.
RAB drilling is a rudimentary and cost effective first pass exploration technique that effectively provides a deeper geochemical soil sample. The company took samples from the drilling at two to three metre depths, therefore providing data from a consistent horizon in the soil profile, free from any surface contamination.
A program of 1,150m for 350 RAB holes have given Great Southern a solid base of new targets to drive the next phase of its exploration program.
One of the new targets is north-south trending and is one kilometre long and interestingly, it looks to be associated with the same geological features as the historical Cox’s Find gold mine.
Great Southern also said a number of samples are enriched in key pathfinder elements such as arsenic, copper, zinc, bismuth and selenium. These pathfinder elements are known to be associated with the altered rocks that host gold mineralisation at Cox’s Find and form broader alteration halos around buried deposits.
Cox’s Find was run by WMC between 1937 and 1942 and produced about 77,000 ounces of gold at a whopping head grade of 22 grams per tonne.
Regis Resources Garden Well mine is located about 12km directly along strike from Cox’s Find. The discovery there was “blind”, meaning there were no historical workings or drilling in the area.
An air core program in 2008 at Garden Well, spaced 160m apart, hit 4m grading 1.88g/t, 4m grading 1.78g/t, 8m grading 1.61g/t and 10m grading 2.22g/t gold.
Only 18 holes followed up these hits in 2009 and thus the discovery at Garden Well was cemented with 47m grading 2.58g/t, 18m grading 11.32g/t and 19m grading 4.46g/t. The mine now has an ore reserve of 1.01M ounces and a resource of 2.47M ounces.
Great Southern said the results of the program have reinforced its geological and structural conceptual model for the controls for gold mineralisation in the area.
Great Southern’s Executive Chairman, John Terpu said: “Knowing the history of this Project, we are excited to be revealing more through our disciplined, staged exploration efforts. These results are not only encouraging but will be highly beneficial for future exploration at Cox’s Find. The Project is advancing well considering GSN only commenced exploration in late 2019.
We are looking for more of these high-grade systems and potentially another high grade 22g/t Cox’s Find deposit.”
The Perth based explorer is the first company to conduct any substantial exploration at the historical Cox’s Find in 25 years and the first to recently conduct any drilling below 60m in-depth.
Its maiden RC drill program last year saw ounce-plus hits rolling off the drill bit including 5m grading a magical ounce to the tonne gold from 134m downhole and 8m grading 9.43g/t from 73m down-hole in another hole.
Watch this space.
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By Matt Birney
