Antipa says its seen through copper-gold discovery’s cunning disguise at Paterson Farm-In Project

The Paterson $30 million farm-In exploration programme, fully funded by IGO (ASX:IGO), delivers multiple targets including seven copper-gold and pathfinder anomalies.

Recent activity at the huge 1,550km² project is part of an ongoing regional exploration programme with an emphasis on greenfield discovery of Nifty, Winu, Telfer and Havieron analogue targets.

Two major components of the 2021 exploration programme were a regional, project scale air core drill programme and soil geochemical sampling programme.

Anitpa (ASX:AZY) says the results provide encouragement with a number of high priority exploration targets requiring follow-up in 2022.

Potential for major greenfield discovery

AZY managing director Roger Mason says the tenure, located within the El Paso Structural Corridor, has just enough shallow cover to conceal, but also detect (via geophysics and soil sampling) potential world-class gold-copper deposits.

“Last year’s exploration results, whilst early stage, provided great encouragement, defining a number of early stage but high priority exploration targets that have the potential to deliver a major greenfield discovery,” Mason says.

Air core targets

The most advanced of these targets is the newly named Ricochet target, where air core drill hole 21PTA0221 returned strongly anomalous gold and silver from 55m, including 1m at 0.43 g/t gold and 1.0 g/t silver from 57m.

Anomalous pathfinders (including arsenic, bismuth, and tellurium) from meta-sediment hosted gossanous (ex-sulphide) quartz veining are coincident with the southern end of a 1.5km long magnetic anomaly.

Around 500m of the Ricochet magnetic anomaly is on the Paterson Farm-in Project, with the remaining 1km and stronger bulls-eye portion of the anomaly, bearing similarities to the Havieron magnetic signature, located on Antipa’s adjacent Citadel JV Project with Rio Tinto which the junior currently holds a 35% stake in.

The other two new targets where air core drilling intersected iron-oxide (ex-sulphide) bearing quartz veining are Frontier and Ricochet South.

Soil geochemical sampling programme

Four highly encouraging copper-gold, gold and multielement pathfinder soil anomalies were identified as part of the 2021 regional fine‐fraction soil geochemical sampling programme, which covered an area of roughly 650km².

These anomalies have been prioritised for infill soil sampling and air core drill testing.

Calendar Year 2022 exploration programme

The Paterson Farm‐in Project 2022 exploration programme, to be operated by IGO, is currently planned to comprise the following activities:

• A 7,000m air core drill programme to test high-priority geochemical targets;
• A 1,000m diamond core drill programme to test high-priority geophysical targets;
• Infill soil geochemical sampling programme;
• Induced Polarisation geophysical survey to identify drill targets along a section of the El Paso Corridor including at the Grey prospect area, where drilling in 2019 intersected shallow copper-silver-lead-gold sulphide mineralisation grading up to 2.3% copper, 562 g/t silver, 6.3% lead and 0.32 g/t gold; and
• A project-scale high-resolution Airborne Gravity Gradiometry survey to assist drill targeting and regional 3D geological modelling.

Antipa was also the successful recipient of two Western Australian Government Exploration Incentive Scheme (EIS) funding grants. One of these being $165,000 to be used for diamond core drill testing of two Paterson Project Havieron look-alike magnetic ± partially co-incident gravity targets located 10 to 15km along trend from Rio Tinto’s massive 2.5Mt copper, 5.9Moz gold and 44Moz silver Winu deposit. Drilling is planned to be completed in the second half of this calendar year.

This article was developed in collaboration with Antipa Minerals, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.

This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.