Every hole hitting high-grade material across 1.5km of untested ground is not routine news for a £17 million company
The results that Great Southern Copper PLC (LSE:GSCU, FRA:E9E) has just released from its Cerro Negro prospect deserve more than a cursory read, according to analysts from Greenwood Capital Partners.
When every single scout hole in a programme hits high-grade mineralisation, and when those holes are spaced across 1.5 kilometres of previously undrilled ground, that is not a statistical accident. That is a system revealing itself.
Greenwood, the company's broker and adviser, frames it carefully but the language is telling.
The firm describes the picture emerging at Cerro Negro as one of multiple stacked and zoned lenses of high-grade silver and base metal mineralisation, and draws an explicit connection between the complexity of the metal zonation and the potential for a long-lived, economically significant deposit.
Multiple pulses of mineralising hydrothermal fluid, they note, are often the key components that build scale and metal tenor.
That is geologist-speak for something worth getting excited about.
The targeting methodology adds another layer of significance. The drill holes were placed using surface geochemistry combined with induced polarisation geophysics, a technique that detects electrically chargeable material underground.
The strong correlation between those anomalies and the actual mineralisation hit by the drills means the company now has a highly effective roadmap for where to look next.
And what lies ahead is interesting: untested anomalies extend at least another kilometre to the south, with Greenwood noting from a site visit last year that some of the best-developed oxide copper mineralisation at surface occurs precisely in that southern corridor.
The company has drilled only around 6,500 metres at Cerro Negro in total across three phases. That is a modest programme by the standards of what could ultimately prove a significant discovery.
Against that backdrop, a market capitalisation of £17 million looks like a significant mismatch with the emerging geological story, and Greenwood says so directly.