Novo heritage signing clears path to explore East Pilbara

Novo Resources has opened the gates to further exploration activities at its priority Bamboo and Miralga projects in Western Australia’s East Pilbara region after securing a key Aboriginal heritage agreement.

The agreement with traditional landowners, the Nyamal Aboriginal Corporation, will facilitate the company’s exploration activities across some 1500 square kilometres of its East Pilbara titles and will include non-ground-disturbing surface work such as mapping and geochemistry. 

The development coincides with Novo’s recent completion of a heritage site avoidance survey, enabling it to kick off drilling on its Bamboo Creek gold trend, with a final report expected later this month.

The company retains a significant land package in WA’s Pilbara region. It stretches for  about 6700sq km and includes its Nunyerry North, Egina, Balla Balla and Karratha super-project areas.

Novo Resources executive co-chairman and acting chief executive officer Mike Spreadborough said: “We are pleased to have reached an agreement with the Nyamal Aboriginal Corporation and thank them for their ongoing support of Novo and our exploration endeavours on their land. The terms of this agreement attest to the strong relationship Novo has with the Nyamal People.”

At its Miralga project, 30km west of Marble Bar, Novo has already begun follow-up mapping and sampling of porphyry and intrusion-related targets it teased out of historical data and supplemented with its own field reconnaissance three years ago.  Recent field work assessed three of those targets and determined that two – Gully Washer and Shady Camp West – warrant significant follow-up investigation.

Gully Washer is a precious and base metals-rich breccia and vein array related to a felsic porphyry (intrusive) stock that outcrops for more than 275m and can be up to 35m wide. Novo’s previous rock sampling at the site yielded best results of 14.8 grams per tonne gold, 10,083g/t silver, 3.8 per cent copper, 28.3 per cent lead and 3.6 per cent zinc.      

The company says the high-grade mineralisation occurs along the margins of the gossanous porphyry and is related to a copper-rich breccia up to 6m wide on the hanging wall and footwall flanks of the intrusion. The footwall of the mineralised gossanous outcrop has thrown up four rock-chip samples exceeding 2000g/t silver along 100m of strike.

The Gully Washer breccia is centred within a broader anomalous copper and alteration zone, east of where stream sediment sampling produced a top gold grade of 266 parts per billion, associated with a distinct pallid surface colour anomaly seen in airborne imagery.

The Shady Camp target area was first defined in the 1980s by Amax Australia, which mapped and sampled classic copper-gold-molybdenum anomalism associated with a leached porphyry. Novo’s follow-up evaluation was prompted in part by its observation that a 2.2km-long radiometric potassium anomaly coincides with a magnetic low and pallid colour anomalism visible on aerial photography.  

Amax’s reconnaissance picked up a best result from costean sampling of 30m going 631 parts per million copper and 100m at 461ppm, accompanied by anomalous gold and copper results on the northern and southern margins of the rhyodacite porphyry intrusive.

Novo’s Bamboo and Strattons projects form part of an extensive single contiguous block of multiple granted exploration licences and licence applications extending along a north/north-westerly strike trend of about 67km. The block sits about 60km east of Marble Bar and contains several zones of anomalous gold in the Apex basalts of the Warrawoona geological suite of rocks.

Orogenic gold deposits are hosted by the Apex basalts along an extensive strike, including the historic Bamboo Creek mining centre that has recorded historical gold production exceeding 220,000 ounces averaging 8.7g/t gold.  

For the Miralga project, Novo is planning its future work at Gully Washer to include further mapping, alteration studies and surface soil and rock-chip sampling in the third quarter of the year. Its goal is to better define high-grade zones noted to date, close off existing soil anomalism, follow up on anomalous stream sediment sample results and overall, to understand the scope and potential of the intrusion-related target area.

And at Shady Camp, in a program set to span several weeks of work in the third quarter of this year, Novo will conduct detailed alteration and vein mapping, soil sampling and follow-up ground geophysics in a bid to generate multielement geochemistry data and geophysical anomalies to establish if porphyry-style mineralisation is present at the site.

And now that the new Nyamal agreement is in place at its Bamboo Creek project, the company says it is keen to begin detailed mapping and soil sampling through a 2km strike of the Apex basalts and at two of the Bridget Suite porphyry intrusions, with an eye to identifying targets for reverse-circulation (RC) drilling.

With a vast area of ground under its belt and access approvals now in place, Novo will now launch the reconnaissance phase of its work before the real heat of summer kicks in – which is annually quite considerable in Marble Bar, known as the hottest town in Australia.

Perhaps, the company’s next phase of work might also uncover some “hot ground”.   

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