Carnavale Resources Ltd (ASX:CAV) has kicked off an aircore drilling program to test a 1-kilometre prospective structure at its high-grade Kookynie Gold Project in WA.
The 5,000-metre drilling campaign is designed to expand a high-grade discovery in a corridor between the McTavish East and Champion South prospects.
Specifically, the drill rig will bunker down on a 1.1-kilometre untested zone between the targets and Carnavale hopes to deliver results in August.
It comes soon after Carnavale completed its second reverse circulation drill program at Kookynie and the explorer expects to announce results from this campaign shortly.
Exploring “highly prospective corridor”
Speaking to the drill program, Carnavale CEO Humphrey Hale said: “We are very excited to be exploring the highly prospective corridor between the newly discovered high-grade McTavish East prospect and the Champion South prospect.
“CAV has gained a better understanding of the complex regolith profile in the target zone from earlier aircore and RC drilling programs completed at the Kookynie Gold Project, as a result, we can see strong potential in areas that were previously overlooked.”
Digging deep at Kookynie
Carnavale’s program is targeting a prospective corridor that hosts the high-grade McTavish East prospect to the southwest and the Champion South project to the northeast.
In the past, a limited amount of aircore drilling outlined a 0.1 g/t gold anomaly, which is hosted within the transported cover along the main structure that hosts the McTavish East prospect.
Further drilling at McTavish East pinpointed anomalous gold in transported material, which was directly attributable to primary high-grade gold at depth within the project’s bedrock geology.
Iconic gold camp
The Kookynie mining district is famous for hosting high-grade gold deposits, such as Cosmopolitan, Altona, Champion, Batavia, Leipold and McTavish.
Most of these deposits were mined at the turn of the 20th century when Kookynie was a substantial mining centre.
Notably, these historical discoveries were all made where there was no transported cover at the gold camp.
As a result, CAV has viewed this as an opportunity to make new discoveries at Kookynie using modern, high powered aircore drilling and detailed geochemistry.