Great Southern Mining is ploughing nearly 8,000 metres of aircore drilling into the Amy Clarke gold prospect within its Duketon tenements in Western Australia. Drilling is aimed at seeking out the source of a 4 kilometre long gold in soil anomaly which the company says exhibits uncanny similarities in size and tenor to Regis Resources nearby 2.1 million ounce Garden Well gold mine.
The Duketon project lies about 45km north of Laverton in WA’s north-eastern Goldfields. It covers more than 450 square kilometres of the multi-million ounce gold-bearing Duketon greenstone belt.
Since acquiring the project in 2020 Great Southern has launched into an extensive review and compilation of historical data which included over 24,000 soil samples and 12,000 drill holes. This led the company’s geologists to pick up a 2km long gold and silver anomaly in a 2014 regional soil survey named the Amy Clarke prospect.
Interestingly, in 1996, Sons of Gwalia intercepted 3m grading 340 parts per billion gold in a mineralised quartz vein at the bottom of a 9m Rotary Air Blast – or “RAB” drill hole that was never followed up.
Great Southern embarked on a follow up soil survey aimed at further defining the limits of the historical gold in soil anomaly. A total of 649 samples were collected for multi-element analysis which expanded the gold anomalism up to 4 km in strike.
Importantly, the company says many of the path finder element anomalies such as tungsten, arsenic and bismuth are coincident with the gold anomalies, supporting the theory that the gold source is nearby.
The position of the soil anomalies is of particular interest as they are located in a long geophysical magnetic low feature, with distinct magnetic high features on each side that correlate to conspicuous outcropping ridges of banded iron formation.
The geophysical magnetic low channel has been traced 3km north and corresponds to the same granodiorite rock that hosts Regis Resources’ recently exhausted 322,000 ounce Erlistoun deposit.
The company looks set to put down about 200 holes across the areas of gold and pathfinder anomalism and drilling is estimated to continue for about 2 weeks with assay results expected early in 2022.
Great Southern Chief Executive Officer, Sean Gregory, said: “We are excited to be back in the field again with this latest drill program at Amy Clarke.”
“The drilling targets were defined after GSN’s extensive data compilation and confirmed by a successful soil sampling program earlier this year. We anticipate this is to be the first of several regional first-pass drilling campaigns across key areas of the many kilometres of mineralised trends that strike through our Duketon Gold Project tenure.”
Drilling at Amy Clarke follows on from a spate of impressive drill hits over Great Southern’s rapidly evolving Duketon Project.
A few pulses quickened last month when assay results returned a best yet drill hit of 68 metres going 1.9 grams per tonne gold from just 61m amongst a wealth of other high-grade hits at the company’s flagship Southern Star gold deposit. The impressive result backed up a previous 59m hit grading 2.1 g/t gold from 53m and a stellar 17m returning 7.0 g/t gold from 111m.
Great Southern says it has secured a diamond drill rig and a reverse circulation drill rig for the 2021-2022 summer with drilling planned to plumb the depths of the expanding mineralised envelope and gain further insight and understanding into the geology and the orientation of mineralised structures.
As temperatures start to soar in the north-eastern goldfields during summer, Great Southern may be on the brink of feeling some immediate relief if drilling at Amy Clarke reveals a new multi-million ounce deposit in the prospective Duketon greenstone belt.
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By Matt Birney
