S2 Resources (ASX:S2R), aka ‘the guys that unearthed the world-class Nova deposit’, are now searching for the next Tier 1 in Finland.

Mark Bennett and the team at S2 have a top-shelf track record of big discoveries, and with ~$13m in the bank they have the luxury of just getting on with it without having to sell a story to the market.

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But the story right now is pretty interesting.

S2 is looking for big gold and nickel deposits in greenfields (underexplored) regions.

Today, the company was granted an exploration license covering the Aakenusvaara gold prospect in northern Finland, originally discovered by Finnish conglomerate Outokumpu in the 80s.

Aakenusvaara is immediately along strike from Outokumpu’s former Saattopora mine which produced over 220,000oz of gold and more than 5,650t copper between 1989-95.

It’s an interesting project, because despite hitting thick, high grade gold like 11m at 9.6g/t from 113m (hole AAV-3), they didn’t follow up.

Many of Outokumpu’s 33 diamond holes were testing geophysical (sulphide) targets and did not target the main subcropping gold mineralisation.

Just look at this:

S2 is planning a 1500m drilling program to test for down dip/plunge extensions around the AAV-3 hole (11m @ 9.6 g/t).

This is about the time the first phase of reconnaissance drilling wraps up at the 1.3km long Aarnivalkea gold anomaly, where S2 believes early results are analogous to the 10moz Kittila mine.

“The only operating gold mine of any importance in Finland is Kittila which is probably close to 10 million ounces of gold by now,” Bennett said in May.

“We were able to get the original Kittila base of till (BOT) results from the geological survey to try and understand how good our numbers were.

“When we looked at the two, they were comparable; if anything, ours looked better.”

Exciting times.

READ: The Explorers: S2 Resources’ Mark Bennett on the secret recipe to finding big deposits


 

In other ASX gold news today:

203 gold nuggets weighing a total 75.3g were picked up by a prospector at Coziron Resources’ (ASX:CZR) Croydon Top Camp project in the Pilbara.

That’s nice little +$5000 payday.

Although the recovered gold is not economically significant to the company, the reported distribution of nuggets is being used by Coziron to identify and prioritise targets for further work.