Great Southern Mining Ltd (ASX:GSN) has been granted all exploration licences at its 100%-owned East Laverton Nickel Project in Western Australia.
The move was facilitated by the successful negotiation of a heritage agreement with the Nyalpa Pirniku Traditional Owners.
East Laverton Project is 20 kilometres east of Laverton in Western Australia and comprises three large exploration licences that GSN applied for in 2018 that have now all been granted.
Nickel sulphide potential
The project has the potential to host massive nickel-sulphide deposits of both the layered-intrusive type and the komatiitic type across 400 square kilometres.
Nickel potential of layered intrusions in Western Australia received limited attention before the 2012 discovery of the Nova deposit in the Fraser Range.
A review of the project by Newexco exploration and geophysical consultants re-interpreted the prospective basal contact of the layered intrusion to be the northeast of the Diorite Hill layered intrusion rather than the southwest as previously thought.
Newexco has recommended a 45-day modern ground-based moving loop electromagnetic survey (MLEM) with the objective of finding Nova scale conductors.
Results of MLEM survey
GSN's chief executive officer Sean Gregory has said: "We look forward to the results of the planned ground MLEM survey, which will be the first modern EM over this target and will be aided by an alternative geological interpretation that places the prospective basal contact in the northeast, rather than the southwest.
“GSN now has exposure to gold at all of its projects and the added benefit of copper and other metals in North Queensland and also nickel-sulphide at East Laverton.”
Identification of 21 new targets
On April 17, the company identified and ranked 21 new gold targets in the Duketon Belt after evaluating a newly acquired regional exploration database in the belt that included more than 12,000 drill holes and 24,000 soil samples.
Seven of the newly identified areas are drill ready, with Golden Star the most advanced and first in line.
Design of a drill program is underway at Golden Star, which 2017-2018 drilling demonstrated to be over 600 metres of strike length of thick continuous zone of gold mineralisation with multiple plus 50-gram-metre gold intersections.
High-grade gold trends in historic drill data correlate to the same mineralised structure that hosts the Rosemont deposit and the Ben Hur deposit.
An extensive soil sample program is due to begin this month at the newly identified One Weight Wonder target to refine the coherent area of anomalism, which has a strike length of 1-kilometre.