ASX listed Southern Gold has confirmed some exciting gold and silver underground channel sampling assays from in-situ epithermal-style veining at its Weolyu South project in central South Korea.
A suite of infill and extensional samples taken from the narrow vein system at the small-scale, historical mine turned up encouraging new results including 0.4m @ 32.8g/t gold and 764g/t silver and 0.45m @ 30g/t gold and 1,280g/t silver.
Another 0.55m sample went nearly an ounce to the tonne gold and just over 43 ounces to the tonne silver.
The new samples were collected from three different ore horizons along the pre-existing, underground exploration drives at the mine.
According to the company, the results continue to outline the excellent gold and silver grades returned in the initial sampling program at Weolyu South in December 2017.
As an added bonus, Southern Gold has now completed re-assaying work on its original batch of samples, which has resulted in an average increase of 30% greater than the initial gold assays.
The work was completed after a review of the original data turned up significant variances in the gold grades reported from two independent assay laboratories.
A third umpire laboratory effectively confirmed an under-reporting of gold values from the initial lab results, which were those reported by the company back in December 2017.
Apparently, there was a much smaller variation in the initial silver grades reported, although there was an average 8% lower variation in those grades too, which is still being investigated.
However, the significant uplift in the gold grades from the re-assaying work is clearly advantageous to the company and likely to have a positive impact of the project’s economics, with gold/silver grades now revealing a greater consistency in their spread at the deposit.
Southern Gold Managing Director Simon Mitchell said: “Weolyu is Southern Gold’s premier exploration target and continues to impress with its very high grade gold and silver tenor from high quality drill-equivalent channel samples at close to true width on the vein.”
“This underground channel sampling is on only one vein system while we have identified multiple epithermal quartz veins on surface, most of which remain untested by drilling.”
“The company plans to drill the down plunge extension of this very high-grade gold-silver system and the other untested epithermal quartz vein systems in the coming year.”
The company is now planning a 500m diamond drilling program targeting the main high-grade Southern Shoot at the Weolyu project.
In addition, Southern Gold is planning a limited “wet” percussion drilling underground campaign to test for parallel mineralised vein sets adjacent to the existing underground drives.
This work is aimed at confirming whether small, faulted offsets to the mineralisation occur before throwing more expensive diamond drilling to define the ore zones at a later stage.
The company will also dewater the flooded sub-level below the current 310 development drive to better access that lower level.
By Matt Birney
