West Perth-based minerals explorer Terrain Minerals has added a new commodity of interest to its Smokebush gold exploration project in Western Australia’s Mid West – lithium.
Terrain has identified up to 20 pegmatite structures to date in a so-called “Goldilocks zone” for potential lithium mineralisation – defined as being between two and six kilometres from a granite intrusive.
Terrain notes that pegmatites are the preferred host lithology of lithium mineralisation across Western Australia. However, whether these pegmatites contain lithium – and at what levels – won’t be known until the assay results of rock chip samples from these pegmatites come back from the laboratory – with the company aiming for February.
The discovery was made by Terrain whilst conducting site visits at Smokebush in the Yalgoo Mineral Field about 65km west of Paynes Find and 350km north-west of Perth.
Management is excited by the find saying most of the identified swarms range between 20m to 30m wide and appear to be running at surface for 100m to 200m before dipping under cover.
The pegmatites appear to be travelling away from the Mt Mulgine granite intrusive that sits immediately west of Terrain’s tenements before fanning out and onto its land.
Management argues the geology of the area comprises predominantly of a complexly folded regionally metamorphosed Archaean greenstone sequence at the southern end of the Yalgoo Singleton Greenstone Belt that has been subjected to multi-phase granitoid intrusion.
Terrain now owns 100 per cent of Smokebush after mopping up the rights to the remaining 20 per cent interest of the gold-bearing ground it did not already own from a private vendor earlier in December.
The company has previously identified multiple drill targets and other prospective areas at Smokebush, where its maiden RC drill program was conducted in August 2020 following up on historic drilling. Grades include 2 metres at 11.3 grams per tonne from 70m and 2m at 9.2g/t gold from 24m.
Moreover, Smokebush isn’t the only string to Terrain’s bow. The company has a 100 per cent-owned rare earths play at its Lort River project, sitting 50km north-west of Esperance.
The Great Southern is currently causing a fair stir amongst rare earths explorers and Terrain’s tenure comprises a hefty 320 square kilometres, giving the company a fair bit to play with.
Terrain says historic data review has identified rare earths within its tenements and its lists shallow auger samples returning total rare earth oxide, or “TREO” grades of up to 580 per parts million TREO, with 25 per cent of the total grade the sought-after magnet rare earths oxide.
Terrain says it intends continuing its systematic approach to exploration with the aim of executing a large JORC-compliant air-core program at Lort River. Drilling will be targeting shallow, high-grade ionic clay rare earths mineralisation in addition to testing for other mineral occurrences – such as the high scandium grades that Terrain says have also been spotted in assays.
With research suggesting global demand for rare earths is expected to double by the year 2030 to about 500,000 tonnes per annum, Terrain will be hoping some of its exploration will lead to it satisfying part of this growing appetite.
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By Matt Birney
