Base Metals: Stavely stuns market with a 40pc copper hit; shares gain 170pc

Stavely Minerals (ASX: SVY) has just made a huge copper discovery at its namesake project in Victoria – which also includes a “surprising” nickel-cobalt hit.

Drilling assay results from the Thursday’s Gossan prospect revealed a monstrous shallow, very high grade intersection — 32m at 5.88 per cent copper, 1g/t gold, and 58g/t silver.

But this included a ‘stunning’ 2m intersection grading 40 per cent copper, 3g/t gold and 517g/t silver. Insane stuff.

The market’s verdict? The explorer leapt as high as 170 per cent this morning.

“It’s not often in the career of an explorer that you see 40 per cent copper grades over sub-metre intervals, let alone over two metres – and those stunning copper numbers are accompanied by very significant gold and silver values as well,” Stavely chairman Chris Cairns says.

But that’s not all — underneath this copper-gold hit was a very decent and “surprising’ 4.4m-long nickel (3.98 per cent) and cobalt (0.23 per cent) intersection, 96.7m from surface:

At this stage, Stavely says it “does not understand” why the nickel-cobalt is segregated — if only by a couple of metres — from the copper-gold-silver mineralisation.

Gold: This 30g/t +300,00ox Tasmanian project hasn’t been touched since 1932

In other ASX small cap base metals news today:

Zinc of Ireland (ASX:ZMI) has gained 5 per cent this morning off the back of more high-grade zinc results. Intercepts included 5m at 13.7 per cent of zinc and 1.4 per cent lead.

Gallileo Mining (ASX:GAL) has begun drilling at its Fraser Range nickel project. This is only the second round of drilling ever conducted at this prospect — the first showed that it has the right rock types to host magmatic nickel sulphides.

Cyprium Metals (ASX:CYM) has announced initial drilling results at its Cue copper project. Drilling highlights included 5m at 2.3 per cent copper, including 3m at 3.4 per cent from 51 metres. Cyprium director Barry Cahill said he was ‘extremely pleased’ with the results.