Kairos Minerals continues to generate highly-promising lithium targets at its 100 per cent-owned Roe Hills project in Western Australia’s Eastern Goldfields region.
The company’s optimism has been boosted ahead of a planned initial 5000m of reverse-circulation (RC) drilling across its growing pipeline of targets in the rapidly-emerging lithium province where it is operating.
Kairos first defined an extensive 2.8km lithium and pathfinder elements anomaly – known as its Black Cat anomaly – early last year at Roe Hills, where it already held an extensive portfolio of high-grade gold, nickel, and cobalt exploration tenements.
Management says its Black Cat discovery bore striking similarities to Global Lithium Resources’ renowned Manna lithium prospect, in terms of orientation, interpreted geology and geochemistry. That find opened the Eastern Goldfields up as a new spodumene-bearing pegmatite province.
The Manna lithium-tantalum project, which has a 32.7-million-tonne JORC resource grading 1 per cent lithium oxide, sits just 10km north of Roe Hills. Recognising the opportunity at hand, Kairos has been busy exploring the project area and defining drill targets. It has now collected 3301 infill deep soil samples from the Roe Hills North area.
Assay results from the most recent 1201 samples from deep soil sampling have delivered multiple new targets. The Whitehorse, Healey Dam and Greyhound targets add to the company’s existing Black Cat and Crystal Palace lithium targets at Roe Hills.
Kairos Minerals managing director Dr Peter Turner said: “We are rapidly generating a host of highly promising lithium targets at Roe Hills in the shadow of the Manna lithium deposit. As these latest results show, the area has immense potential but has barely been explored for lithium and critical minerals.”
Of the new targets, management made special note of the 2000m-long lithium and pathfinder Whitehorse anomaly – a high-priority drill target of compelling size and composition.
Whitehorse is interpreted to be an along-strike extension of the Black Cat lithium-beryllium-caesium anomaly and in a similar geological setting to many of the other lithium pegmatites in the Eastern Goldfields. Management believes that defines it as an attractive follow-up target.
Kairos has planned its initial 5000m of RC drilling across Black Cat for lithium and gold and Crystal Palace for lithium, in addition to probing its Blue Jay prospect for rare earths. The company is awaiting final heritage surveys before drill pads can be prepared and the drill rig mobilised and believes the program has the scope to be extended, depending on the campaign’s success.
Field investigations are now also underway at Whitehorse, Healey Dam and Greyhound, with the aim of identifying potential lithium pegmatites and indications of gold mineralisation.
Management used aeromagnetic interpretation to help identify target areas of interest ahead of its soil sampling and geological fieldwork at Roe Hills North. The strategy will continue in the project’s south, where the company is aiming to identify more areas with exploration potential for both lithium and gold and to guide its future exploration efforts.
It also has plans to collect another 1550 soil samples to the south of the area already sampled and to infill in key areas. That program is expected to start in the next quarter.
With Kairos continuing to add highly-promising targets as it advances towards drilling, it will be interesting to see what it can uncover in this new and underexplored lithium province.
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By Meagan Evans
