Impact jumps on nickel-copper-PGM play in WA

Impact Minerals has picked up an interesting suite of five tenements that it believes are prospective for nickel-copper-PGM in the south-west of WA’s Yilgarn Craton. The tenements will be known as the Arkun project. The Yilgarn Craton is revered for its gold, nickel and copper deposits, however, more recently interest has turned to the rare suite of platinum group elements in the area.

Impact’s new ground has a veritable mix of geological features that its says may play host to nickel-copper-PGM and/or gold mineralisation.

The Arkun project covers about 850 square kilometres and is located 100km east of Perth. Impact has identified a number of nickel-copper and gold geochemical anomalies across the project from historical datasets.

Historical nickel values from soil samples range up to 96 parts per million, copper values up to 174ppm and gold up to 11.5ppb. These anomalies have not been subject to any follow up.

Impact also said the magnetic geophysical data suggests the presence of a major north-west, south-east trending 500km long deformation zone. The Arkun project straddles part of this major zone and according to Impact, this structure may represent a boundary between two ancient continents.

These terrane boundaries sometimes have key ore controlling characteristics in other prospective terranes that play host to some big deposits such as Nova-Bollinger and Legend Mining’s Mawson deposit.

This big magnetic feature at Arkun also has a coincident gravity signature that may indicate a package of dense rocks at depth. Denser rocks can suggest the presence of mafic and or ultramafic rocks, which are the preferred host for nickel deposits.

Impact also noted that the magnetic data contains numerous “eye structures”, which are another characteristic that is known in the Geological fraternities to be associated with Nova-Bollinger-type deposits.

This major structural zone is already host to emerging discoveries further north of Impact’s Arkun project such as Cassini Resources’ Yarawindah project, where that company recently headlined some outstanding results from its Julimar project.

Cassini drilled a super high-grade nickel-copper-PGM sulphide zone at Julimar that contains intercepts such as 0.12 metres grading 5.97 per cent nickel, 0.75 per cent copper, 0.39 per cent cobalt and 2.66 grams per tonne PGMs from 84.3m depth.

Other results from Julimar include a 5.05m intercept grading 0.69 per cent nickel and a 1.17 per cent copper intercept at 57.95m down hole.

Impact will now embark on some reconnaissance work prior to the official grant of the tenements and it will continue to interrogate the old data for more clues that may be masking a sleeping giant.

Impact Minerals Managing Director, Dr Mike Jones said: “Arkun is a highly prospective addition to our exploration portfolio and we acted very quickly when alerted to the opportunity. We now have an exploration project that has excellent underlying fundamentals for the discovery of a major nickel-copper-PGE deposit as well as for the discovery of gold…”

“Arkun complements our exciting Broken Hill nickel-copper-PGE project, recognised for its outstanding grades of these metals and where we are preparing for a major drill programme.” 

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