ASX-listed gold and base metals explorer, White Cliff Minerals, has moved swiftly to almost double its footprint around the historic Reedy South gold project 40km north of Cue in WA’s Murchison goldfields.
The Perth-based company has snapped up the Cracker Jack gold project where historical reconnaissance drilling has taken place and that adjoins its existing Reedy South tenements.
White Cliff has also made an application for an additional exploration licence area, which – if granted – will expand its overall Reedy South project landholding from 156 square kilometres to 272 square kilometres.
The company recently announced an initial mineral resource estimate for Reedy South that it calculated using three decades of historical drilling results, after acquiring the project only last month. The maiden inferred and indicated resource stands at 779,000 tonnes at an average grade of 1.7 grams per tonne for 42,400 ounces of contained gold.
The Reedy South project area takes in the historic underground workings of the old Pegasus and King Cole deposits and covers a handful of kilometres centred on the southern portion of the gold-bearing Reedy Shear Zone, within the Meekatharra-Wydgee greenstone belt.
The shear hosts a clutch of high-grade gold deposits with vertical plunging gold mineralisation extending to depths of 500m. The deposits include Westgold Resources’ producing South Emu-Triton underground gold mine at the Reedy’s gold mining centre about 1km north of Reedy South.
White Cliff says it has launched into a desktop review of historical drill data relating to Cracker Jack, which is located about 10km south of Westgold’s mine. First-pass rounds of RC and rotary air blast drilling were undertaken by St Barbara Mines and Gold Mines of Australia between 1993 and 2000.
According to White Cliff, gold mineralisation is apparent at Cracker Jack in several small historical prospecting pits along the eastern contact of the banded iron formation with mafic rocks.
The new 100-square-kilometre exploration licence application area also straddles an interpreted extension of the Reedy Shear Zone, offering further potential prospective strike and favourable geology. The company says the ground holding, which is underlain by the banded iron formation unit and an ultramafic and mafic contact zone with granites, has been largely underexplored.
White Cliff is hoping to kick off an RC and diamond drilling program at Reedy South totalling approximately 3,000m before the end of the year. It plans to initially vector in on depth and along-strike extensions of known gold mineralisation.
The gold junior suggests Reedy South has the potential to host a regionally significant gold resource, particularly in light of the lack of systematic exploration. Historical exploration carried out at the project, it says, has been predominantly limited to near-surface work consisting of prospecting, soil sampling and wide-spaced shallow drilling that did not exceed 60m-80m depth.
In conjunction with the first drilling campaign, White Cliff intends following up the current reviews and reprocessing of historical exploration data for Cracker Jack and the new exploration licence application area with initial geological mapping and other early-stage field exploration.
It would seem the work at Reedy South has only just begun.
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