Stelar Metals Ltd (ASX:SLB) has snapped up the Baratta Copper Project in South Australia’s prolific Adelaide Fold Belt.
The South Australian Government has granted the exploration licence covering the project, which lies adjacent to a historical mine that produced copper more than a century ago.
Baratta is prospective for Zambian-style, sediment-hosted copper deposits and Mississippi-Valley Type (MVT) lead-zinc mineralisation, and Stelar plans to examine its prospectivity with a jam-packed initial work program.
The critical minerals explorer plans to hit the ground running with geological mapping, as well as soil and rock chip sampling, while geophysical data is compiled and processed to aid in future drill targeting.
Big-picture, Baratta is one of five highly prospective copper and zinc projects the company intends to explore, committing to an aggressive exploration program in this world-class mining district.
Mapping interesting anomalies
Commenting on the tenement grant, Stelar Metals CEO Colin Skidmore said: “The newly granted Baratta copper tenement bolsters our portfolio of projects in the Adelaide Fold Belt, which we think is prospective for both zinc-lead mineralisation and sediment-hosted copper.
“Exploration has been very limited to date, but it has revealed some interesting anomalies and mapped out extensive tracts of mineralisation at surface.
“In its day, the adjacent, historical Baratta Copper Mine was a significant project.
“Stelar looks forward to starting fieldwork on this tenement in the coming months.”
Rich exploration history
Panda Mining explored the Baratta area from 2007 to 2016, and initial work included limited rock-chip sampling and acquiring satellite imagery.
Reconnaissance exploration and target generation work was also carried out, but targets were not drill tested.
Historical soil sampling work, using handheld XRF over several grids, has detected strata-parallel zinc-lead anomalies close to the contact of the Tapley Hill and Wilyerpa formations at the Valley Well prospect, as well as copper-cobalt anomalism northeast along strike of the historical Baratta Copper Mine.
The mine produced copper ore between 1896 and 1904, and the same structure that is interpreted to control copper mineralisation at the Baratta mine is exposed over a significant strike length in the eastern part of Stelar’s Baratta tenement and is considered prospective for copper, lead and zinc.
Previous mapping over the Baratta copper prospect area indicated copper was hosted by a 1-metre-wide, flat-dipping quartz-haematite gossan that was semi-continuous over 1.5 kilometres of strike length.
In May 2010, a detailed airborne magnetic and radiometric survey was flown on 100-metre-spaced flight lines and in 2014, an intermediate gradient-induced polarisation survey was undertaken over a 64-square-kilometre grid.