Great Southern hits the high notes with Amy Clarke aircore drilling

Aircore drilling has returned shallow gold intersections with a standout hit of 8m grading 6.7g/t gold at Great Southern’s Amy Clarke prospect in Western Australia.

Importantly for the company, the gold intersections have excellent correlation with the kilometre-scale gold in soil and immobile pathfinder elements, which forms a newly defined mineralised trend.

Adding more interest, the high-grade bedrock intersections suggest the source of the gold anomalies is close by.

For Great Southern Mining (ASX:GSN), the combination of scale and strike continuous anomalism highlights the potential of the Amy Clarke prospect within the Duketon gold project to host a significant gold deposit at depth.

The soil anomaly has a similar size and tenor to Regis Resources’ (ASX:RRL) 2.1Moz Garden Well gold mine – the largest gold deposit in the broader Duketon Greenstone Belt.

“These new shallow aircore results are an exciting development for the Amy Clarke prospect,” chief executive officer Sean Gregory said.

“The geological team have spent the last year progressing this area from a conceptual target to now an area that has intersections of high-grade gold.

“It also demonstrates that the methodology employed by the exploration team is working to progress our projects towards discovery.”

The company is currently waiting on multi-element, bottom of hole analysis results and 1m gold assay data from the mineralised aircore intervals to vector in on deep drill targets.

Drilling from concept to gold

The 172hole program totalling 5,586m was completed during December 2021 to assess the gold potential of the kilometre-scale gold in soil anomalies delineated in September last year.

Multiple holes encountered gold anomalism that form a coherent north-south gold trend through the prospect.

Great Southern notes that the top hit forms part of a larger anomaly that has excellent correlation with the kilometre-scale gold in soil anomaly and is also the first high-grade hit in the Amy Clarke area with grades in line with those found in gold deposits throughout the Goldfields region.

The position of the intersection is also encouraging as it sits 32m to 40m downhole within a sheared basalt with quartz veining in fresh rock below the weathered zone.

In addition, bismuth in soils showed excellent correlation with the gold in soil anomaly with concentration towards the centre ‘hotspots’.

Aircore drilling has confirmed that bismuth is a good proxy for gold mineralisation as the main mineralised trend while the high-grade intersection sits directly in line with the bismuth anomaly.

Other work

Besides waiting for the multi-element, bottom of hole analysis results and 1m gold assay data, Great Southern expects to start a geology mapping exercise over the Amy Clarke/Ogilvies area to investigate the anomalous trends and further refine regional target areas.

Exploration at Amy Clarke is still at its early stages, but the intersection of high-grade gold is certainly encouraging.

Separately, the company is also waiting on assay results for two diamond holes that it had drilled at Southern Star.

Information from these holes will inform the planned reverse circulation drilling program at Southern Star.

This article was developed in collaboration with Great Southern Mining, 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.