Impact Minerals Ltd's (ASX:IPT) Commonwealth Project in New South Wales continues to emerge as a potential company maker, after follow-up drilling delivered the best gold intersection to date.
At the Silica Hill prospect, Impact revealed from reverse circulation drilling: 14 metres at 4.5g/t gold from 153 metres, including 3 metres at 10.4 g/t gold.
The 14 metre intercept lies within a 40 metre thick intercept with greater than 0.1g/t gold.
This could be just the beginning of the mineralisation, with assays from silver and other metals are expected within three weeks.
Dr Mike Jones, managing director, commented:
"This excellent intercept further demonstrates the potential for Silica Hill to deliver a significant discovery and we can draw three significant conclusions from it.
"First, as we have suspected, there are likely to be zones of much higher grade gold in the system to accompany the exceptional silver grades of up to 3,100 g/t already discovered.
"Secondly, we are seeing significant improvements in grade with closer spaced drilling and this offers the opportunity to rapidly increase the ounces of contained gold and silver within the area already discovered.
"Thirdly, the mineralisation is now open to the north west. These are all very encouraging developments."
Commonwealth Project likened to Eskay Creek Mine
Impact’s work has shown that the mineralisation at Commonwealth-Silica Hill is part of a gold-rich VMS system and has strong similarities to the Eskay Creek Mine in Canada.
Eskay Creek hosts >4 million ounces of gold and 150 million ounces of silver.
This comparison has led to the recognition that there is significant potential to increase the possible contained ounces of gold and silver within the envelop of mineralisation already discovered with closer spaced drilling.
Impact wholly-owns the Commonwealth Project which forms part of its extensive land holding of 1,000 square kilometres in the Lachlan Fold belt.
The belt is home to numerous gold and copper mines including the giant Cadia deposit near Orange which hosts 40 million ounces of gold and 12 million tonnes of copper.