Gold Mountain dials-in on Brazilian lithium

Gold Mountain Ltd. has moved closer to locking-down drill targets at its Custodia hard-rock lithium project in Brazil with stream sediment sample assays backing-up soil sampling results. 

Stream sampling has identified a total of 15 new areas with lithium concentrations above background levels and only two of those areas have seen overlapping soil sampling programmes to-date.  The company says it will be back on the ground shortly to conduct an extensive follow-up soils program before getting a drill-bit in the ground as soon as possible. 

Management says some of the newly identified areas of interest approximately coincide with zones of anomalous lithium concentrations shown by soil samples released to the market in January last year, with several of areas sitting along strike from and adjacent to the soil sample hits.

The best of the stream sediment samples went 81.5, 75.8 and 75.3 parts per million (ppm) lithium oxide and are located away from the areas assessed by soil sampling, leaving plenty of room for future soil testing to potentially back them up.  

The Custodia project area has not seen a drill-bit yet and remains relatively unexplored, however Gold Mountain says a total of 18 pegmatites have been mapped across its tenements and rock chips samples have assayed as high as 431 ppm lithium oxide.  

Significantly, the results of a 28-sample rock chip program released to the market in January last year showed 10 samples that assayed at over 100 ppm lithium oxide, all with geochemistry suggesting the rock type is lithium, caesium and tantalum (LCT) bearing pegmatite – the kind of rock that is developed globally to feed the lithium hungry battery manufacturing market. 

Management says a new soil sampling program is currently being planned to test some of the 15 new areas of interest shown by the stream samples, with the aim of putting drill rods in the ground to assess the thickness and depth extension of the pegmatites.  

The interesting part of the puzzle will be the lithium grades in the fresh pegmatites, as all testing to date has looked at weathered rock and soil only where grades are typically subdued. 

The Custodia project sits in the relatively unexplored Borborema Province of Brazil, near the town of Custodia in the north-east of the country. The project is a joint venture between Gold Mountain and another Australian based explorer Mars Mines with Gold Mountain holding a 75 per cent interest while Mars has the remaining 25 per cent. 

Brazil is major player in the global lithium market, with lithium deposits attributed mainly to the Minas Gerais region to the south, although the north-east of the country has been gaining interest recently with more explorers moving in to avoid the crowds in the south. 

Gold Mountain has also been looking at what Brazil may have to offer in the rare earth’s market.   Just last month the company applied for 57 exploration licences making up a massive 100,000-hectare land package prospective for rare earths. The ground is adjacent to the Gina Rinehart-backed Brazilian Rare Earths’ tenure which is looking at an exploration target of 8 to 12 billion tonnes at between 1000 and 1500 ppm total rare earth oxides (TREO).

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