Great Southern fires up rig in hunt for monster | Australian Markets

An enormous day has lastly arrived for Great Southern Mining and Gold Fields Limited after the mining duo kicked off a high-stakes diamond drilling marketing campaign at their Edinburgh Park project in Far North Queensland in a transfer that would unearth the area’s subsequent main gold-copper system.

The program is focusing on big-ticket induced polarisation (IP) anomalies at two key prospects dubbed Leichhardt Creek and Mt Dillon. Both targets show the geological hallmarks of large-scale intrusion-related gold-copper-silver systems.

The marketing campaign is being funded by South African mining juggernaut Gold Fields, which appreciated what it noticed on the project and inked a $15 million earn-in three way partnership in 2023 to secure up to 75 per cent of the sprawling Queensland play.

The deal offers Gold Fields publicity to your complete province-scale project, which stretches throughout 11 exploration licences in a area teeming with potential.

The transfer got here after Great Southern pinpointed 29 promising targets in outcropping mineralisation and thru geochemical surveys over 4 years of exploration. For Gold Fields, it was enough to back the junior explorer with severe firepower.

The three way partnership settlement was seen as a robust vote of confidence in what stays one of Australia’s most underexplored frontiers, 100 kilometres southeast of Townsville.

At Leichhardt Creek, the drill rig is set to punch out three deep holes for a complete of 2200 metres. The first gap will plunge 1000m in depth and can take a look at a shallow, arch-shaped IP chargeability anomaly. Gold Fields management says this signature seems to be eerily just like the 3-million-ounce-plus Mount Leyshon gold-silver mine, positioned 120km west.

The rig will then pivot to a second gap to zero in on a potential mineralisation feeder mapped from earlier aeromagnetic information, earlier than plunging 800m to chase one other juicy chargeability anomaly.

A 3rd gap will home in on the center of the second anomaly, the place conductivity readings have topped 50 millivolts per volt.

Field mapping has already firmed up a number of sulphides – together with pyrite – in outcropping rocks – alongside a stockwork of quartz-pyrite veining unfold over a whopping 4km by 1km space. Soil sampling additionally lit up with zoned gold, silver and base metals, whereas rock chips have returned up to 10.5 grams per tonne (g/t) gold.

When Leichhardt Creek is wrapped up, the rig will shift to Mt Dillon, the place a giant chargeability anomaly lies 200–300m beneath a distinguished hill. A second, deeper resistivity anomaly, probably linked to altered porphyry rocks, sits just under the upper anomaly.

Great Southern has deliberate two holes to chase each zones and the indicators are promising. Mt Dillon’s topography seems to be a preserved silicified lithocap, which is typical of a giant porphyry-style system. Surface alteration, together with clay, pyrite and silica with high sulphide content material, has added fuel to the fire.

Globally, comparable lithocaps have delivered monsters similar to AngloGold’s Quebradona, containing 4.26 million tonnes of copper and seven million ounces of gold. Other examples of lithocaps embrace ATEX’s Valeriano mine with 7.1Mt copper and 9.6M ounces of gold, and the huge Lepanto-Far Southeast system in the Philippines, which hosts more than 20M ounces of gold and 4.5Mt of copper.

Meanwhile, Great Southern and Gold Fields are utilizing geophysical surveying to generate further targets throughout the project’s 1750-square-kilometre footprint. Their Edinburgh Castle and Molongle prospects are subsequent in line, with the latter already spitting out rock chips grading up to five.27g/t gold.

With the rotary reality teller now spinning, Great Southern may very well be closing in on a main copper-gold prize and its heavyweight backer has the pockets to make it depend.

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