Barton drilling to define initial gold resources at Tarcoola

Barton is looking to continue building the gold footprint at its camp-scale Tarcoola project in South Australia with the start of its Phase 3 drill program.

The program of about 24 holes totalling some 4,700m will seek to extend the new shallow, high-grade Perseverance West gold zone to establish new, easily accessible resources and to test the priority School and Ealbara regional prospects.

Barton Gold (ASX:BGD) says the roughly 350m zone at Perseverance West is offset and parallel to the Deliverance Target and has been confirmed to a depth of about 125m from surface at its western extent and remains open along strike and at depth.

Previous intercepts at Perseverance West include 5m at 48.9 grams per tonne (g/t) gold from 115m, 5m at 20.6g/t gold from 59m and 7m at 9.72g/t gold from 42m while Deliverance includes assays such as 6m at 43.6g/t gold from 197m and 5m at 20.6g/t gold from 59m.

“Last year’s Phase 2 drilling successfully identified a new and potentially high-value opportunity on our open pit at Perseverance, and our numerous geophysical studies have confirmed a long list of exciting regional targets,” managing director Alexander Scanlon said.

“This year our focus at Tarcoola will be twofold: (1) Establishing an initial Mineral Resource accessible via our existing open pit, and (2) new regional discoveries across an historically rich mineral domain.

“Barton plans to complete more than 20,000 metres of drilling in the coming 6 months. We are excited to test several newly validated targets, with a focus on significant growth of Tarcoola’s mineralised footprint.”

Regional exploration

The Ealbara regional prospect is located in the northern part of the Tarcoola project area and lies on a major inflection zone of the Lake Labyrinth Shear Zone, which is known to host significant gold mineralisation at Indiana Resources’ (ASX:IDA) Minos and Ariadne prospects.

Image processing and 3D inversion modelling of gravity data acquired over the Ealbara prospect during September 2021 supports a strong correlation of density bodies within the interpreted position of the LLSZ.

These results confirm multiple prospective structural targets at Ealbara.

Barton plans to carry out about 2,200m of drilling to test the thickness of the local Gawler Range Volcanics (GRV), validate the structural predictions hypothesised by Barton’s new geophysical modelling, and test for anomalous gold mineralisation.

Meanwhile, the School prospect contains prospective structures observable in the new gravity data that correspond with structures interpreted from prior detailed aeromagnetic surveys and provide confidence in the targeting methodology.

A strong density anomaly that cross-cuts the geological strike has also been identified immediately to the northwest of the School prospect.

The edge of the feature corresponds with a major north-south trending break or contact in the magnetic data, a setting that is similar to other local mineralised structures.

This article was developed in collaboration with Barton Gold, 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.