Javelin Minerals has identified a host of copper-gold exploration targets at its Coogee project in the St Ives goldfield in Western Australia after independent and collaborative reviews of reprocessed geophysical and other data.
Recently-defined drill sites include a gold-copper target indicated by a high-intensity magnetic anomaly 300m north of the Coogee open pit and potentially down-dip from the company’s Coogee North mineralisation and an adjacent deeper magnetic signature underneath it. The Coogee project sits 20km north-east of the WA Goldfields town of Kambalda and 55km south of Kalgoorlie on the north side of Lake Lefroy.
The new targets have emerged from the extensive review of geophysical data that was commissioned by Javelin’s new board and conducted by independent geological consultants and the company’s technical team.
Management recently engaged Core Geophysics to compile all historical open-file geophysical activity related directly to the Coogee gold project. Core’s search through the WA Government’s online systems shows that the Coogee project area has been the subject of several high-resolution airborne geophysical surveys.
Javelin is now reviewing all available geophysics and historic geochemical and drilling data in a bid to generate and prioritise key exploration targets for drilling.
The company has engaged independent geological consultancy OmniGeoX to compile, review and interpret all existing project drilling and geophysical data to help plan an exploration drilling program, with a view to making the earliest possible start on testing of priority targets.
Javelin Minerals executive chairman Brett Mitchell said: “We know Coogee hosts a gold system in a world-class address on the edge of the famous St Ives goldfield. But despite these outstanding credentials, there has been little or no drilling on so much of the tenure. These geophysical results highlight the huge upside at Coogee, with numerous compelling targets identified below and around the Coogee deposit.”
To date, the target generation process has come up with eight targets. The first three lie within the company’s smaller mining lease, which encloses the old Coogee open-pit mine.
The remaining targets fall within the company’s bigger exploration licence to the west of and contiguous with the mining lease that has been the subject of extensive drilling since the original discovery of the Coogee gold mineralisation in the mid-1990s.
The most recent work at the lease targeted copper-gold mineralisation at Coogee North, about 300m north of the open pit. It identified a main and an eastern trend, both of which seem to be open to the north-west, which could be partly consistent with some of the structural overprints seen in the magnetics.
Javelin believes there is the potential for a “big gold-copper system” that could lie at depth to the north-west. The site’s third target, about 750m west of the Coogee open pit and also associated with a magnetic trend open to the north-west, has not been followed up, despite one drillhole put in by Ramelius Resources intersecting 23m going 0.38g/t gold.
The final five targets are based primarily on geophysical anomalism. The fourth target, a strong magnetic anomaly in the south-eastern corner of the licence, has never been drilled and appears to be the highest-priority focus.
With its new board and management in place and another $2 million tipped into the kitty from its recently-completed capital raising, Javelin is on track to kick off with the drilling of its new targets in the final quarter of this year.
It is also undertaking an independent review and update of the existing Coogee resource, which the company expects will give it a solid footing on which to build its gold inventory in one of the world’s great gold-mining provinces.
So, as Javelin prepares to get the bit between its teeth, it is finalising plans for drilling its intriguing targets that somehow seem to have missed previous attention.
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By Doug Bright
