After a COVID-19 related delay, Native Mineral Resources is set to hit the ground running next month as it chases a range of gold targets at its Music Well gold project in the world-class Yilgarn Craton region in Western Australia’s Eastern Goldfields.
Having only acquired the Music Well tenements in November 2020, the company is now moving quickly to join a growing band of explorers that are hunting for the next big intrusion-related gold system in the Yilgarn Craton following the major gold discoveries by De Grey at Hemi and Northern Star at Ramone.
Considered by management as an analogue to Saracen Minerals’ 600,000-ounce Bundarra gold project just 20 kilometres to the west, Native Minerals believes that despite limited exploration, there is still plenty of evidence that Music Well has significant potential to host intrusion style gold mineralisation.
Previous geochemical sampling at the project has returned high grades of gold, grading up to 20.2 grams per tonne from small-scale artisanal gold workings in the area.
Native Minerals’ Geologists have already developed a detailed geological synthesis and accompanying hypothesis that have identified a zone of low magnetic material, perhaps indicative of surrounding greenstones that sit along the granite contact zone.
Management suggests the Music Well Project is almost a mirror to the style of mineralisation found at the intrusion-hosted Wonder and Celtic orogenic gold deposits within the Bundarra project.
It says that any of the structures hosting mineralisation and the gold deposits to the west may potentially continue onto the Music Well tenement.
A major focus of the upcoming field work program will be northeast-north-northeast-trending quartz filled fractures and faults that are coincident with magnetic lows.
Native Minerals’ studies point to the eastern of two tenements as having the highest potential for the rapid identification of surface or near-surface gold mineralisation and it is planning to target this tenement first in the upcoming campaign.
The program will include field mapping of exposed structures, with a particular emphasis on detailed structural mapping of both the mineralised and non-mineralised veins. The geologists will investigate outcrops of basements rocks to better characterise the correct geology in the region which currently does not match the geophysical datasets available.
Field work will also involve rock chip sampling of quartz veins, bulk samples for crushing and separation of coarse gold and gridded rock chip sampling in an area of approximately 50 metres x 50m over target quartz veins and host rock.
Field mapping is expected to be completed in late March and rock chip and other assay results are anticipated in Q2 2021.
Blessed with a strong “nearology” story thanks to its proximity to a number of producing mines and a large gold deposit, Native Minerals is already pursuing short term mining opportunities in the central part of the Music Well project area.
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By Matt Birney
