The complex mineralisation at Strickland Metals’ Marwari trend is unravelling to reveal a 2.6km-long corridor with similar gold enrichment style to that seen at its former Millrose project – which it sold last year to mining giant Northern Star for $61 million.
Strickland says the corridor contains six leads, all in fresh rock below the shallow, high-grade oxide zone, which has seen little drilling to date. The company says it is planning to get its drill bit in the ground in April.
The Millrose analogue is drawn from the relationship between gold grade and structural geology, in particular the grade reduction seen in fresh rock at the intersection of the main mineralised north-west-trending Celia shear zone and cross-cutting north-east-trending faults.
Holes drilled on the north-east-trending structures at Millrose produced low gold grades in deep fresh rock despite the overlying oxide zone giving up good grades of up to 25m at 1.5 grams per tonne and 25m at 2.7g/t. The peculiar and somewhat frustrating lack of grade below the oxide was replicated in north-east cross-cutting structures at Wanamaker, to the north of Millrose, and again at the Millrose South prospect.
Significantly, the Millrose deposit showed good gold grades within fresh rock intersected by deep holes drilled just to the north and south of the north-east-trending structures.
In fact, the grades were so good that Strickland became one of the ASX’s strongest performing juniors last year following the neck-breaking maturation of Millrose. Following its June 2021 purchase of the project for $10 million, the company matured the resource throughout the following year, leading to the till-ringing sale last June.
Management says it is confident Marwari is throwing up the same geological puzzle seen at Millrose, hypothesising high-grade fresh rock at depth just along strike from the cross-cutting north-east-trending structures.
Strickland Metals chief executive officer Andrew Bray said: “This corridor remains entirely untested in several large portions along strike and largely untested at depth for almost the entirety of the prospect area. It has also become apparent the initial holes at Marwari were drilled on a significant NE cross-cutting structure. This same setting of NE cross-cutting structures was also observed north of Millrose at Wanamaker and again at Millrose South, with the same results. Moving immediately along strike to the north and south of these NE structures, however, was where the main Millrose Mineral Resources were located. Strickland is now confident that this is what occurred with the initial Marwari drilling.”
The 2.6km trend between the Marwari prospect in the north and the Warmblood prospect in the south gives the company ample opportunity to drill and avoid the cross-cutting structures seen at Marwari. Strickland has six targets on the trend begging to see the drill bit – Marwari North and South, Filly Deep, Filly Gap, Warmblood Deep and Warmblood South.
In support of its geological model for fresh-rock gold enrichment below the oxide, Strickland has historic drilling results to back up its claims.
Filly Deep has assays from deep drilling going 38m at 1g/t gold from 80m and 11m at 1g/t from 205m. Filly Gap has holes going 16m at 4g/t from 59m, 11m at 5.3g/t from 81m and 10m at a massive 24.3g/t from 89m to the end of the hole. That 10m of high-grade material also contained a 3m super high-grade chunk going 48.3g/t.
Moving further south along the trend, the Warmblood prospect has fresh-rock drill hits going 22m at 5.6g/t gold from 53m, 24m at 3.7g/t from 83m including a 10m section grading 7.8g/t, 24m at 1.4g/t from 68m, 23m at 2.1g/t from 79m and 21m at 2.1g/t from 68m.
Gold mineralisation at all of those leads remains open at depth and they remain only sparsely drilled. Management says just 7 per cent of drilling has occurred below 150m and only 3 per cent below 200m.
Strickland says it is preparing to get back out to drill at the Marwari area as soon as the wet season wraps up, which could be sometime late next month or in April.
But for now, the company is busy re-logging historic drill chips from all deposits within its wider Horse Well project area in parallel with litho-geochemical analysis of samples from the area in an effort to map out pathfinder-element trends and to mature the geological model across the project.
Management says the next batch of holes will likely step out north and south from Marawi, away from the north-east crosscutting faults, in search of the deeper, primary mineralised orebody feeding the higher gold grades seen in the shallow oxides.
Marwari is about 85km north-east of the mining town of Wiluna in WA’s Goldfields-Esperance region, in the northernmost part of the Yandal/Millrose greenstone belt that hosts several multi-million ounce gold projects such as the Jundee, Bronzewing and Darlot-Centenary gold mines.
Strickland says the gold resource at the Horse Well project sits at 5.72 million tonnes at 1.4g/t for 257,000 ounces.
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By Andrew Duffy
