Classic Minerals continues to go for gold at Kat Gap near Southern Cross in WA, with soil sampling pointing to an extensive gold anomaly west of the company’s high-grade discovery. Classic has recently completed a detailed auger program adjacent to the Kat Gap resource, where it has identified an extensive gold target covering more than 900 metres of strike – best results in these shallow auger holes tip the scales at up to 2,130 ppb gold.
Classic’s auger drilling program that was designed to infill previous wide spaced sampling to the west of the company’s 93,000-ounce Kat Gap gold discovery, hinted at a possible buried gold anomaly. The auger punched through the sand and gravel cover over the target and has proved a highly effective tool for exploration in the region.
Classic Minerals Chief Executive Officer, Dean Goodwin said:
“This new high-grade auger soil gold anomaly is well out into the granite and represents an exciting new development for the Kat Gap Project. We have been looking west out in the granite for a while now and wondered what might be lurking out there.”
“The gold is at a very high level of concentration for an auger soil anomaly suggesting something substantial maybe hiding underneath. Given the gold is in all types of surface material including sand, gravel and clay the anomaly is most likely insitu and not transported in from another location”
Classic’s Kat Gap project is located 370km east of Perth in Western Australia and 70km south of the company’s 311,000-ounce Forrestania gold project on the Southern Cross greenstone belt.
The company’s Kat Gap gold discovery lies adjacent to the granite-greenstone contact in the south of the belt where high-grade gold mineralisation is hosted within shear and breccia zones, associated with auriferous quartz veining.
Classic’s ongoing development program continues to show outstanding results including metallurgy testing that delivered gold recoveries of over 96 per cent. The company’s recent purchase of a portable ‘Gekko’ gravity gold processing unit confirms Classic’s faith in its discovery and potentially delivers a rapid pathway to production as gold continues to test US$2,000 an ounce.
The Kat Gap deposit outcrops at surface with resource drilling having already outlined a resource of 975,722 tonnes at 2.96 g/t gold. Moreover, Classic’s recent work on Kat Gap has indicated that discovery zone may extend undercover to the west, and along strike, prompting the company to extend the coverage of its auger geochemistry surrounding the deposit.
The detailed auger program was comprised of shallow drilling on a 50 by 50m grid down to depths of around 0.7m, and specifically targeted an iron-rich duricrust that represents an ideal medium for gold enrichment – the duricrust lies below a veneer of transported sand, gravels and clays.
Results from the program include a significant number of results above 300 parts per billion, or ‘ppb’ gold with five samples returning more than 1,000 ppb or 1 gram per tonne gold – an impressive first pass.
Analysis of the previous exploration work, including topographic surveying, shows this anomaly is most likely to be insitu and not transported from the nearby Kat Gap resource, meaning the anomaly is potentially sourced from primary gold mineralisation hosted by the underlying bedrock.
Curiously, it appears this new zone of gold mineralisation is hosted by the footwall granites to the Kat Gap deposit, which is unlike the main deposit area that is hosted along the granite-greenstone contact. The company is now planning a program of RC drilling to follow up on this new anomaly.
If the upcoming drilling program over the western anomaly comes up trumps, Classic will have outlined a style of mineralisation on the belt that could open it up to a whole new range of possibilities. Regional geochemical sampling has already outlined granite-hosted targets along strike from the Kat Gap discovery that will require investigation.
Whilst gold-in-granite is a reasonably new concept in the Forrestania region, there are a number of gold camps across the Yilgarn that host considerable gold reserves in this poorly explored environment, including Norton Gold Fields ‘Golden Cities’ deposits near Broad Arrow, north of Kalgoorlie. The Golden Cities camp boasts resources in excess of 4.3Mt at 1.37 g/t gold.
Classic looks to be quickly turning a snack into a meal with its gold discovery at Kat Gap which looks set to grow in the coming months as drilling continues.
Is your ASX listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au
By Matt Birney
