Kingwest Resources Ltd (ASX:KWR) has identified extensive gold anomalism and mineralisation in aircore drilling over more than 1,000 metres in strike length at Target A9 within the Goongarrie Gold Project (GGP) in Western Australia.
Deep aircore drilling tested aero-magnetically defined litho-structural targets in five areas with three of those areas (Target A9, A9 North, A6 and A5) returning encouraging results in the weathering zone, which Kingwest believe may be indicative of more extensive primary gold mineralisation in the underlying bedrock.
At Target A9 drilling on five 200 metre-spaced lines has defined a 1,200-metre-long by 300-metre-wide zone of strongly anomalous gold geochemistry and gold mineralisation that is open along strike to the north and south.
Results indicate prospectivity
Chief executive officer Ed Turner said: “Our exploration programs at Goongarrie continue to indicate how prospective the project is for major gold deposits.
“We look forward to following up these results with more detailed drilling at Target A9 as well as initial drilling of targets A1, A2, A3 and A10 which lie under the salt lakes in the north of the project.”
The Target A9 gold discovery has strong gold depletion in the upper part of the weathering zone and is progressively covered by up to 50 metres of alluvial lake clay sediments as it heads south.
Where exposed in the north, it has been drilled to the base of weathering with a best intersection of 6 metres at 17.2 g/t gold from 94 metres in KGA038.
South of there, drilling intersected broad intervals of lower-level gold in the gold-depleted weathering zone and beneath the alluvial lake cover.
This zone now requires deeper, closely spaced drilling to investigate the extent and grade of gold mineralisation in the underlying fresh bedrock.
Lake exploration update
Kingwest has significantly progressed exploration of the previously inaccessible major part of the Goongarrie project that lies beneath the Goongarrie Salt Lake.
A high-resolution aeromagnetic study has been completed over the western half of Lake Goongarrie and a few of the resulting litho-structural targets have been tested by a program of deep geochemical pitting.
This deep pitting program was limited in extent, but it has successfully located several strongly gold anomalous drilling targets under previously unexplored areas of Lake Goongarrie.
The most promising of these targets to date is the A10 target, which lies at the intersection of a 500-metre-wide northwest-trending D4 shear zone with a thick Black Flag Group conglomerate unit.
A track-mounted drilling rig is scheduled to test Target A10 along with Targets A1, A2 and A3 in the second quarter of 2021.
Follow-up Lake pitting program
Kingwest has researched a number of previously successful salt-lake gold exploration studies, notably by Western Mining Corporation at Lake Lefroy.
They have concluded that a deep pitting program to sample the interface between the Lake Goongarrie equivalents of the Lake Lefroy Pliocene Roysalt Evaporite unit and underlying Lake Lefroy Miocene Revenge Shale is most likely to detect geochemical evidence of any gold mineralisation in the underlying bedrock.
Although a statistically very small number of interface samples have been taken at this stage, these have returned some surprisingly high gold values.
It is apparent from these results that whilst some gold values are close to the expected <10ppb gold background level of soil interface geochemical surveys, there are several others in excess of 50ppb gold and eight that are in excess of 100ppb gold.
These gold levels would be regarded as highly anomalous in a conventional surface soil geochemical survey.
Kingwest conclude from the above results that, whilst there are low level background gold values in some places, there are also unusually high levels of gold values in others, notably over some of Kingwest’s most promising magnetically defined litho-structural targets, and that these may relate to underlying gold mineralisation.
These targets, and other similar ones that have yet to be pit sampled, are therefore considered to be high priority drilling targets.