Special Report: Great Southern’s belief that its North Queensland tenure hosts the next major gold system in the district has received some endorsement from $8bn miner Evolution.

After all, it is not everyday that a major company commissions an exploration survey over your ground when it does not have an actual stake in the project.

Yet, this is exactly the position that Great Southern Mining (ASX:GSN) has found itself in with Evolution Mining (ASX:EVN) offering to pay half the cost (over AUD$127k) of flying a hyperspectral survey over GSN’s projects in North Queensland.

GSN’s North Queensland tenement package includes the Edinburgh Park Project with a boundary that extends from 25km away to within just 5km from the EVN’s world class Mt Carlton gold-silver-copper project — which co-incidentally was discovered by Conquest Mining (now Evolution Mining) when Terpu was there as managing director.

Less than 15 per cent of the Edinburgh Park area of more than 1,000km2 has been explored using modern techniques. With this amount of tenure GSN’s management know that a baseline, first principles approach to target identification is the most cost-efficient technique to exploration success in what is “elephant country”.

With GSN already accumulating geological mapping and geochemical survey data, the hyperspectral survey will provide project-scale, high resolution base map image mosaics that will define various alteration zones over the whole of each project and provide an unprecedented view of the underlying geology and mineralogy.

The result will be a word class dataset that would be the envy of many a major mining company, not just junior explorers.

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“We are looking for the next Mt Carlton in what is a highly prospective, well-endowed gold district. We welcome the support of EVN to acquire the survey and from our reconnaissance exploration and drill programs to date, their interest gives us the confidence that the geology has all the right attributes to host the next tier 1 deposit.”

“Evolution presented us the opportunity to partner with them to acquire this data over our extensive Queensland land tenure. It really is the cherry on top of what will be an incredibly powerful dataset to evaluate new and existing drill ready targets across our projects,” executive chairman John Terpu said.

Initial geological mapping and geochemical work undertaken by Great Southern in late 2018 and early 2019 had led to the company announcing in February this year that it had discovered a new gold system at the Edinburgh Park Project.

The Rocky Ponds Breccia Pipe target was singled out as an immediate “drill ready” target with excellent logistics access and rock chips returning grades of up to 0.38 grams per tonne gold and 6.9g/t silver.

A subsequent reconnaissance drilling program returned results such as 0.2 grams per tonne gold, 49.7g/t silver and 0.44 per cent copper and act as a “signpost” to higher grade mineralisation.

Indeed, the company said that the results bore similarities with the A39 and V2 deposits at Mt Carlton, where early exploration drilling results around the margins of the orebody had also intersected similarly modest gold, silver and copper intersections.

And now that Evolution has taken notice of the project, Terpu believes that interest in GSN’s North Queensland Project’s will only grow.

“EVN is a world class company and to have the opportunity to work with them on our Projects is one we couldn’t pass up. They have considerable experience in the area and request to fly the survey over our tenure reinforces our view on the prospectivity of the tenure.”

Read more: Why Edinburgh Park could be a game-changer for Great Southern Mining

 

This story was developed in collaboration with Great Southern Mining, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.
This story does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.

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