Ark Mines’ rock chips highlight gold and silver potential of Pluton project

• Ark Mines’ rock chip sampling at its Pluton project returns intriguing assays of up to 25g/t gold and 34g/t silver
• Results highlight potential to find significant gold and silver at the project
• While company is focused on Sandy Mitchell, Pluton remains a compelling wet season field option

Special Report: Wet season sampling at Ark Mines’ Pluton gold project in North Queensland has returned rock chip assays topping up at 25g/t gold and 34g/t silver that validates historical results.

The rock chip sampling, which returned average grades of 3.4g/t gold and 7.1g/t silver, also featured good pathfinder correlations, which is expected to advance further exploration.

Adding further interest for Ark Mines (ASX:AHK), the structural relationships with prospective lithologies show potential to extend the target area.

“What’s not to love about 25 grams per tonne? Even the 3 gram per tonne sample average is very nice,” executive director Ben Emery said.

“There’s a lot of work still to be done at Pluton and we don’t want it to distract from Sandy Mitchell and the great story Ark is developing there, but Pluton has potential that we can’t ignore and makes a good wet season field option.”

The company recently raised $1.5m through a share placement priced at 14c per share to expedite exploration and development at Sandy Mitchell.

Wet season sampling

AHK had carried out initial rock chip sampling at Pluton during the wet season hiatus of the intensive field program at its flagship Sandy Mitchell rare earths project in North Queensland.

Pluton is 7.6km east-northeast of the far north Mutchilba township on the Mareeba Dimbulah Road and about 26.5km southwest of Mareebah.

In the 2024 to 2025 North Queensland wet season, the company undertook a preliminary rock chip survey to validate the 2005 results of then tenement holder Ralph de Lacy.

This sampling was focused on potential gold host lithologies with 30 samples taken.

Correlation analysis shows the gold mineralisation correlates with arsenic, copper, selenium, tellurium, bismuth and sulphur, and negatively correlates with tin, tungsten, lead and zinc.

Silver mineralisation is largely uncorrelated with gold, positively correlated with lead, zinc, mercury, selenium and sulphur and negatively correlated with tungsten.

These relationships suggest overlapping or telescoped mineralisation styles that may be petrologically distinguishable with further field works.

While previous operator Malachite Resources had concluded that mineralisation at Pluton was wholly related to the brecciation of the Hodgkinson sandstone, AHK’s results that continue outside the breccia suggests there may be structural controls on mineralisation that expand the target and indicates potential for multigenerational overlap of different mineralisation styles.

This article was developed in collaboration with Ark Mines, 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.