Maiden Drilling Highlights Gold Potential In Victoria
Victorian gold explorer Navarre Minerals Limited (ASX:NML) has moved quickly to expand its acreage holdings after receiving encouraging reconnaissance air-core (AC) assay results from its maiden drilling programme at its fully-owned Jubilee Gold Project in Victoria, Australia.
The drilling programme targeted three previously undrilled geophysical anomalies, interpreted as repetitions and extensions of the historically mined, high-grade Jubilee quartz reef.
A routine field duplicate sample collected from 14 -15 metres depth in one drill hole returned a gold grade of 1.5 grams per tonne gold (g/t Au) versus an original assay of 0.1 g/t Au. The company believes this indicates the potential for coarse gold.
The Project is in a world-class gold district, 25 km from LionGold Corp’s Ballarat gold operations.
Buoyed by what it has seen so far, Navarre has sought to strengthen its footprint at Jubilee by applying for two adjacent exploration licences, over the western side of the historical Ballarat Goldfield.
The maiden AC drilling is part of a 12,000m campaign to test Navarre’s regional targets. The regional drilling is additional to a 14,000m diamond drilling programme underway at the company’s flagship Resolution and Adventure lodes, on the Irvine basalt dome.
All three targets returned strongly anomalous gold grades of up to 1.5 grams per tonne associated with abundant quartz veining and have significantly expanded the footprint and robustness of the Jubilee project. These anomalous grades are considered significant for this early stage of reconnaissance drilling into the weathered top of the gold-bearing basement rocks.
Navarre’s Managing Director, Ian Holland, said:
“We are excited to have completed our maiden air-core drilling program at the historical Jubilee Gold Mine, the first drilling in more than a century despite a history of yielding high-grade gold from a single transverse quartz reef structure.
“The drilling has detected strongly anomalous gold grades associated with quartz veining in oxidised basement rocks, above three geophysical anomalies thought to represent repetitions and extensions of the historically mined Jubilee quartz reef.”
Mr Holland added that considering the scale of the target, the favourable geological setting and the tenor of the results being generated in this early phase of exploration, there was “considerable potential to outline a large-scale gold system at depth, all just 25 kilometres from an operating mine with significant processing capacity.”
“With a healthy cash balance of $9.9 million at end of December 2020, Navarre is looking to expand its regional drilling programs. This includes preparing for step-out, infill and deeper drilling at Jubilee to scope the extents of the mineralising system.”
