Miramar looking for a big bite with drilling at Whaleshark

Miramar is keeping up its blistering exploration pace with aircore drilling starting at its large Whaleshark copper-gold project in WA’s Ashburton region.

The aircore program, which will test for geochemical anomalism beneath mobile metal ion soil anomalies and the pressure shadow target at the unconformity between the Proterozoic basement rocks and the overlying Cretaceous sediments, follows the company starting drilling at the Glandore project earlier this week.

Miramar Resources (ASX:M2R) will use a track-mounted aircore rig at Whaleshark to minimise environmental disturbance and the drill program is expected to take about four weeks to complete.

“At Whaleshark, we have very large surface geochemical anomalies above a Proterozoic granitoid intrusion at relatively shallow depths when compared with other IOCG prospects,” executive chairman Alan Kelly said.

“The large Ernest Henry IOCG deposit in northern Queensland has a well-developed geochemical anomaly at the unconformity between the cover sediments and the basement rocks.

“If we can outline a similar anomaly with this aircore drilling, and reduce the size of the targets, it will greatly assist in refining potential basement targets for deeper RC and/or diamond drilling.”

Whaleshark project

The Whaleshark project – located 40km east from Onslow – is characterised by a large, folded banded iron formation (BIF) complex, intruded by granite, under about 100m of Carnarvon Basin sediments.

Local geology is interpreted to be the Ashburton Formation, part of the Capricorn Orogen, a belt of Proterozoic-aged rocks between the Archean Pilbara and Yilgarn Cratons.

Previous work intersected gold mineralisation in the BIF and outlined a low-level surface gold anomaly in an interpreted “pressure shadow” target at the southwest end of the granite.

Two phases of MMI sampling carried out by Miramar over the project also outlined two large copper-uranium-rare earth element-molybdenum-tungsten anomalies on the eastern edge of the granite intrusion.

This article was developed in collaboration with Miramar Resources, 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.