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Base Metals: Stavely follows up that game-changing copper discovery, sniffs out more high grade hits
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Stavely Minerals (ASX:SVY) has announced more thick, high grade copper hits to follow on from that “stunning” discovery at its namesake project in Victoria.
The new hole is 160m south of the discovery hole targeting the Thursday’s Gossan prospect.
It returned assays of 8m at 9.69 per cent copper, 0.4 grams per tonne gold and 16.8g/t silver from 177m down-hole along with a shallower but thicker intercept of 59m at 1.8 per cent copper, 0.43g/t gold and 15.4g/t silver from 98m.
This sent the stock up over 20 per cent in morning trade to $1.34 per share. What a ride.
But more excitement could be on the cards with visual observations of drill core from another two step-out holes, each a further 80m to the southeast, indicating that both holes encountered zones of massive to semi-massive mineralisation.
Importantly, the shallow mineralisation being delineated by these holes appears to be a major exploration breakthrough for the company.
This breakthrough came from a review that highlighted similarities between the mineral system at Thursday’s Gossan and the Butte, Montana and Magma, Arizona copper deposits — though the company cautioned that its exploration program was still at an early stage.
“The recognition that we should be using a Magma/Butte high-grade structurally-controlled mineralisation model for our exploration drill targeting has now been rewarded with spectacular success in the first two diamond holes drilled to evaluate a shallow 500m long target at the Ultramafic Contact Fault,” Stavely executive chairman Chris Cairns said.
“In conjunction with the narrower intercepts in SMD052 and SMD053, each drilled 80m further along strike to the south-east, we believe this change in the thickness and grades of mineralisation reflects a natural pinching and swelling of the structural zone which will produce inherent variations along strike and down-dip.”
Cairns added that while he expected to see further examples of this natural variance in grades and thickness as drilling continued, Stavely had only just started drilling this target.
“We are now drilling some closer-spaced holes to the original intercept in SMD050 to understand any secondary structural controls on the very high-grade copper-gold-silver mineralisation while awaiting assay results from SMD052 and SMD053, which will then inform the next steps for drilling,” he said.
“This new Magma / Butte model has significantly expanded our ‘search space’ and a number of previous shallow historical air-core and RC intercepts of massive sulphides are clearly much more significant than previously thought and are now considered to be high-priority targets for diamond drill testing.”
Stavely has now brought a second drill rig on site to increase its drilling capacity and may deploy a third rig to test similar regional targets.
READ MORE: Stavely stuns market with a 40pc copper hit; shares gain 170pc
In other ASX small cap base metals news today:
Archer Exploration’s (ASX:AXE) Albion Downs nickel project in WA could host Type 1 massive sulphides similar to BHP Billiton’s (ASX:BHP) Mount Keith Nickel Mine, which is just 18km to the north northwest.
This follows a review of historical information relating to the tenement.
Krakatoa Resources (ASX:KTA) has appointed Rangott Mineral Exploration as its New South Wales exploration contractor to fast track work on the Belgravia copper-gold project in the East Lachlan province, the largest porphyry province in Australia.
