Geopacific picks up 1.4km gold zone in PNG

ASX listed Geopacific Resources has enhanced its Woodlark gold project in PNG with a slew of high-grade gold anomalies returned from an island-wide soil sampling program.

Grades up to 6.28 grams per tonne gold were outlined in the Watou area, centred about 2km south of the Woodlark King project, which already contains a mineral resource of 109,000 ounces.

A 1.4km long cohesive gold anomaly that runs through the Watou area has been defined, with numerous clusters returning greater than 1g/t gold in soils.

Historical exploration in the Watou area includes shallow drilling, with a best intercept of 16m @ 3.3g/t gold.

Surface trenching at Watou produced assays up to 27.4g/t gold from rock chips.

There is also evidence of alluvial gold mining in the drainages south of Watou, which is encouraging and may lead to the identification of coarser gold mineralisation in that region. 

The sampling adjacent to Watou defined the presence of a continuous linear feature more than 3.8km long, with anomalous gold values greater than 0.1g/t across the entire length of the interpreted structural feature.

Additionally, geochemical sampling around the Woodlark King project itself identified 3 separate clusters of anomalous gold results with values up to 1.18g/t gold in soils.

One of these clusters northeast of the existing Woodlark King resource is in a previously unexplored area with no historical gold workings and may represent a parallel mineralised system, according to the company.

Geopacific Managing Director Ron Heeks said: “Exploration to define the wider extents of the Woodlark goldfield has commenced and the initial results are very encouraging. They will begin to guide us to defining the potential of the larger Woodlark goldfield across our 600 square kilometres of exploration licences.”

“The results from this program are extremely high for soil values and indicate several strong sources of potential new mineralisation in areas with little or no previous exploration. The extent of the anomalism over such broad areas is consistent or greater than those identified over the current pit areas, which currently hold delineated Reserves of more than 1 million ounces.”

“With results this encouraging, we look forward to what other areas may hold.”

The company said that the comprehensive soil sampling program across prospective areas of Woodlark Island is now 50% completed.

Soil samples are being collected at 50m centres on lines 200m apart and hence the work is quite detailed and will provide Geopacific with a consistent level of geochemical baseline data to guide exploration in the wider Woodlark goldfield.

Regions with stronger gold anomalies are being revisited to undertake infill soil sampling programs and reconnaissance mapping is ongoing to better understand the geology and structure possibly causing those specific higher-grade clusters.  

It would appear that Woodlark Island is a highly mineralised geological system and Geopacific is in the box seat when it comes to proving up a regional scale deposit in what is arguably one of the world’s best endowed mineral regions.