Aruma Resources has added almost 300 square kilometres of prospective central WA gold acreage to its exploration portfolio with the pegging of the greenfields Carter Well project, east of the historical Mt Magnet mining town in the Murchison region. The company plans on getting boots on the ground as soon as regulatory approval has been granted.
The Carter Well Project is 75km east of Mt Magnet and north of the Windimurra Intrusive Complex. Aruma says it is potentially a new greenfields gold play as it appears to show characteristics consistent with Aruma’s sediment-hosted gold exploration model.
A heritage agreement with local traditional owners of the project area has been inked and Aruma plans to start on-ground fieldwork and firm up drilling targets for a maiden drilling program as soon as regulators formalise its exploration licence.
The company is interpreting Carter Well as being on a major east-west trending dolerite dyke with intruding greenstones. Greenstone exploration has recently been successful for Aruma at its Salmon Gums gold project, near Norseman in the eastern Goldfields, where in March it reported bonanza gold intersections of 5m grading 50.2g/t gold from 42m including an intersection of 3m yielding 83g/t gold from 42m.
In addition, magnetic surveys indicate the presence of folded volcanics under laterite cover. Notably, the nearby Windsor and Paynesville gold mines are found in similar geology as is construed at the Carter Well Project area.
Aruma says there are historic gold occurrences in the area near the Carter Well project, however USA oil and gas company Chevron, when drilling for uranium in the 1970s, reported mafics and ultramafics in the northern zone of the project area, in between granite outcrops, but did not carry out gold assays.
Management believes there is a relationship with the proterozoic east-west dolerite dykes and the common occurrence of gold mineralisation in reactive sediments near the cross-cutting dykes.
The company theorises the dykes may follow old major crustal sutures, or fluid pathways, that carry the mineralised fluids from high-temperature leaching zones to deposit metals in reactive porous sediments, for Carlin Style deposits — specifically high-grade quartz veins with coarse gold and lower grade, larger stratbound lodes yielding very fine gold.
Mapping indicates that the gold targeted Yalogina formation, a sequence of reactive volcano-sedimentary sediments, extends into the Carter Well area and may be the sequence causing the features seen on magnetics data.
Aruma is currently revisiting Salmon Gums, sinking up to three diamond core holes in the program, drilling to about 300m to get a better geological picture of the Salmon Gums project.
It expects to finish drilling this month after pulling out core samples to identify rock types, mineralisation, metallurgy and stratigraphy, along with gold grades and controls.
Aruma’s March results came from 6243m of RC drilling in a wide-spaced drilling program across the Thistle and Iris plays at Salmon Gums, after an initial 2298m in 33 holes and a follow-up drilling round of 3945m across 39 holes.
The exceptional gold intercepts were relatively shallow, with 5m at 50.2 g/t gold from 42m, 3m yielding 83 g/t from 42m and the head-turning 1m zone reporting 224 g/t gold from 44m.
Aruma Resources’ spread of gold and lithium projects now spans almost the length of WA, from the Melrose and Saltwater projects to the north in the Pilbara, Carter Well in the centrally-located Murchison and Salmon Gums and Mt Deans in the eastern Yilgarn Craton in the south near Esperance.
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