Junior explorer Victory Mines has judiciously applied for an additional five exploration licences around its Mt Ida-Ida Valley project, which will now share a tenement boundary with celebrated fellow explorer Red Dirt’s newly acquired Mt Ida gold project. Victory says northward extensions of the recently announced lithium bearing pegmatites on Red Dirt’s ground may creep up into its new tenure.
In the event the new applications are granted, Victory will have approximately 900 square kilometres of ground that it says is prospective for gold, nickel, platinum and now lithium. The new applications lie to the south of its existing ground and immediately north of Red Dirt’s newly acquired Mt Ida Gold project that was subsequently deemed to be highly prospective for lithium after old pegmatite assays were unearthed.
Red Dirt Metals acquired the Mt Ida gold project from Ora Banda Mining for $11 million on 24th September this year. Just four days later it announced that during the due diligence period, its technical team had noted multiple high-grade lithium intervals intersected within previously ignored pegmatite bodies on the western contact of the main granite intrusive known as the Copperfield Granite.
Red Dirt’s shares subsequently rocketed skywards from $0.18 to $0.90 on the back of the new lithium-tantalum pegmatite potential at the project and in the days after the announcement, more than $5 million worth of Red Dirt stock swapped hands.
Victory has engaged Southern Geoscience Consultants and Thomson Aviation to carry out a low‐level detailed aeromagnetic and radiometric survey of the entire Mt Ida‐Ida Valley project area starting in November. Flight line spacing will be 50 metres using a survey sensor height of 35‐45 metres with a total of approximately 21,000 kilometres of flight lines to be conducted.
The survey results are expected in December with geophysical interpretation anticipated to be completed in early 2022.
According to Red Dirt, who used to be known at TNT Mines Limited, it has so far identified 44 drill holes from a total of 4295 holes within its historic dataset that have either been logged with pegmatite occurrences or incidentally assayed for lithium as part of a multi-element analysis. Of this historical subset, 15 holes contained assays for lithium and tantalum, with significant results including 24 metres at 1.84 per cent lithium oxide and 350 parts per million tantalum pentoxide from 160 metres.
Red Dirt also said one diamond hole drilled way back in 2006 was shown to intersect 23.3 metres of spodumene-bearing pegmatite from 252.2 metres downhole in the immediate hanging wall of the Baldock copper-gold lode. This pegmatite core was never submitted for assay and accordingly Red Dirt has dispatched it off the assay lab.
Victory says the pegmatites at the project are considered highly likely to extend northwards into the new tenements it has applied for that will be the subject of intense exploration as soon as they are granted.
Additionally, the company is mindful of the nickel, copper and platinum group metals potential for the Mt Ida‐Ida Valley project as St George Mining has recently identified significant nickel and copper mineralisation at its Mt Alexander project, which is also adjacent to Victory’s project area.
Victory is upbeat about the potential multi-element prospectivity of its ground holdings in the area with Executive Director, Matthew Blake saying “Victory now has a significant exploration portfolio in a highly prospective area commencing from just north of the historic Copperfield‐Mt Ida Goldfield and covering the northward extensions of potential granites, pegmatites and E‐W and N‐S structurally controlled ultramafic intrusives. Our new aeromagnetic survey is timely as it should provide us with valuable new radiometric and magnetic information for our ground follow‐up evaluation of potential new nickel/copper, gold/pgm and now lithium activities”.
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