Siren Gold has unearthed several old workings and taken channel samples and rock chips in its first pass field program at its Queen Charlotte antimony and gold project in NZ along strike from historical antimony mines.
The company, already focused on advancing its flagship Sams Creek and Langdons gold and antimony projects in New Zealand, has identified a mineralised strike potential of 8 kilometres within a 12km long shear zone in New Zealand’s south island where hangingwall and footwall reefs offer a parallel doubling of potential.
The initial fieldwork has successfully traced the dominant structure, known as the Endeavour shear zone, which now clocks in at over 12 kilometres long and is up to 100m wide.
The project is located about 120km east of Sams Creek and hosts three known historic mining centres, including the Endeavour Inlet, Endeavour East and the old Resolution Bay mine.
Antimony ore in the form of the mineral stibnite was first discovered within the project around 1872 and the Endeavour Inlet mine was New Zealand’s largest antimony producer at the time, yielding some 3000 tonnes of stibnite ore between 1880 and the mid-1890s.
Notably the old-timers pulled ore out of the mine averaging an extraordinary 40% stibnite with some individual samples jumping out of the bag at 96% stibnite.
The company has now collected more than 100 samples across various outcrops and mine workings, with laboratory assay results now awaited.
Management is particularly keen to chase the gold component here, since historical mining largely focused on extracting the high-grade antimony, often ignoring the gold.
Siren Gold CEO Zane Padman said: “The scale and continuity of mineralisation across the Endeavour Shear Zone reinforces the strategic importance of the Queen Charlotte Project within Siren’s portfolio.”
The Maria Reef on the western footwall edge of the Endeavour shear zone looks to be particularly well mineralised. Back in 2015, a channel sample across the Maria Reef at the base of a hill returned 5.4m going 5.4 grams per tonne (g/t) gold.
From there, rock chips were picked up all the way up the hill over a 1.2km zone ranging from 1.5g/t up to 4g/t gold.
Its true thickness ranges from two metres to an impressive six metres, comprising a mixture of quartz veins, quartz breccia and sheared schist.
Siren was able to locate and channel sample six outcrops of the Maria Reef. The Skyline Reef - the hanging wall lode - was also located and sampled. This reef contains a visible 0.5m-thick stibnite vein, again with mineralised schist in the footwall.
The Endeavour East mine, located a further three kilometres to the south, was also successfully located and sampled. The presence of massive stibnite and arsenopyrite-bearing quartz on the mullock heaps confirms the mineralisation style is similar to the Endeavour Inlet mine, extending the proven mineralised strike here to around five kilometres.
Siren says metallurgical test work on the antimony back in 1977 showed it could produce a stibnite concentrate grading 63 per cent antimony with an overall recovery of 90 per cent, laying a solid foundation for future development.
While Queen Charlotte is shaping up well for Siren, its money shot is the advanced Sams Creek deposit to the west.
Sams Creek is large-scale intrusion related gold system with an existing and growing resource of 824,000 ounces going a very respectable 2.8g/t gold with additional resource drilling now under way.
Previous intersections of 20m at 6g/t gold and 48m at 1.6g/t gold were intersected from a 50m wide porphyry dyke which remains open for at least 1km down dip. High grade rock chip sampling by Siren suggests there is much more to find from additional porphyry dykes along 7km of strike.
Another string to Siren’s bow is its gold- and antimony-bearing shear related system known as the Langdon’s project, also in New Zealand. That project has several coherent gold and antimony soil anomalies suggesting undiscovered mineralised structures.
With gold and antimony both trading at record highs, Siren would appear to be well placed to tap into the current market sentiment for both minerals.
The company is well funded for extensional drilling at Sams Creek which will likely provide a constant stream of news.
The New Zealand mining industry, a solid contributor to its economy, is undergoing a significant shift, evidenced by the government’s Minerals Strategy with a renewed focus on critical minerals like antimony and gold.
There would appear to be a shifting of the sands in New Zealand – a country that is clearly well endowed with mineral riches but one that embraces those riches cautiously.
Siren looks like it has a real shot now at securing a mining license at Sam’s Creek and if the early numbers at Queen Charlotte stack up when the rotary truth diviner eventually does its thing over there, it just might be looking for two mining licenses.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au
