Eclipse Metals (ASX:EPM) has now been granted an Exploration Mineral Permit (EPM25698) by the Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines for its West Mary Valley Project.
West Mary Valley covers over 30 square kilometres with two known historical manganese workings within the project area.
The project lies west of Eclipse’s highly prospective Mary Valley Manganese Project.
Literature assessment of the historical Queen Mary mine workings (1908-1910) within EPM25698 indicates that full extent of mineralisation has not been exploited.
This provides Eclipse with substantial exploration upside.
Adding to the prospectivity of the area, there had been no systematic modern exploration for manganese deposits over the three exploration mineral permit areas until recent activity by Eclipse.
Geological evaluation of old reports over the Queen Mary Manganese workings indicates potential for significant tonnage of siliceous ore.
Historical sampling of mineralisation returned assays in the order of 44% manganese.
Prospectivity
The Mary Valley Manganese Project has historical mine dumps, which contains a mixture of mineralised rock and waste rock.
The three largest historical mine dumps containing a total of about 1350 square metres of rubble were sampled during the recently completed fieldwork.
Assays ranging from 0.55% to 42.31% manganese with a mean of 13.27% manganese were returned from a total of 35 samples.
There has been no systematic modern exploration for manganese deposits within the project area.
Strategically located
Eclipse’s Mary Valley Manganese Project is centred about 15 kilometres south of the town of Gympie in southeast Queensland, 138 kilometres by road north from Brisbane.
Gympie is a major regional centre and able to provide services and infrastructure support to exploration and mining activities.
Analysis
Eclipse has extended its tenement holdings over the Mary Valley Manganese Field to 210 square kilometres.
There is significant potential to identify additional mineralisation at Mary Valley in many prospects in these largely under-explored tenements - where only a limited area has been examined to date.
Historically, discovery of high grade outcropping manganese mineralisation during logging operations led to sporadic periods of small-scale mining in which limited tonnages of the highest grade ore were extracted.
Within the three tenements comprising Eclipse’s Mary Valley Manganese Project there are at least twenty two occurrences of known manganese mineralisation.
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