WA explorer Resources and Energy Group (ASX:REZ) has unearthed a major – and previously unrecognised – gold-rich zone along the east side of the historic East Menzies gold project.
An extensive drilling program to dial in on ‘the next major discovery’ will kick off this month.
In the 1890s, Menzies was one of the biggest and highest-grade gold producers in WA’s Eastern Goldfields, from hundreds of shallow workings.
But for the last 20 years this hugely prospective ground essentially lay dormant, until REZ was able to consolidate +112sqkm of strike along this gold-rich part of the Norseman – Wiluna greenstone belt.
The explorer has an embarrassment of targets.
On the more advanced western side, scoping and pit optimisation studies have kicked off to investigate opportunities for early cashflow from renewed mining operations.
But in the hunt for ‘the big one’, the company’s focus is presently on exploring the eastern side of the project area.
This image highlights the emerging prospectivity of the southern and eastern domains, where air core drilling has now identified multiple gold trends under cover (dark pink):
These are potentially exciting new discoveries and cover the area where previous RC work included results of 21m @7.1gpt from 36m and 5m @29.2gpt from 52m terminating at 13.8gpt.
REZ notes that a 40ppb (parts per billion) gold anomalism has historically been a strong indicator for economic gold grades within the corridor – this drilling campaign has hit average grades above +100ppb.
Significantly, the mineralised trends are bound east and west by the Springfield‐Venn Corridor, which is host to a number of major gold mining areas.
According to REZ, these areas have previously been largely overlooked due to poor exposure, and application of inappropriate exploration techniques such as soil sampling and auger drilling.
‘A potential major mineralised zone’
A first-pass 5000m aircore program has now identified 10 new zones of anomalous (low grade) regolith mineralisation, distributed over two domains in the central and east part of the East Menzies gold project area.
Most recently, shallow (~31m deep) early stage aircore drilling at the ‘Chronos’ prospect unveiled five large gold anomalies, with isolated grades exceeding +1 gram per tonne (g/t) gold.
These anomalies are big, each ranging from 500m to 1.25km long, and up to 250m wide.
Results comprise mineralised intervals of up to 28m thick, which typically range from 20 to 40m depth.
Highlights included 10m at 0.88g/t gold from 47m, including 6.7g/t at 51m.
As with previous results at the ‘Kore’ and ‘Demeter’ prospects, these results are a very positive step forward in the search for a major deposit, “and are strong indicators of a potential major mineralised zone in this part of the project area”, the company says.
The Kore‐Demeter and Rhea prospects to the east of Chronos have analogues with the 1.4-million-ounce Golden Cities deposits, located between Paddington and Menzies.
Kore itself is a major bedrock gold anomaly “and may represent a very large gold system, possibly as much as 4km in strike length”, REZ says.
Accelerated follow-up drilling
As a result of these discoveries, REZ will bring forward a deeper +5000m reverse circulation (RC) drilling to test for higher grade mineralised shoots in fresh rock below the regolith which may lead to an economic gold discovery.
Drilling is expected to kick off in early September.
The program will comprise of 46 reverse circulation holes for 5,030m over what the company views as core zones of mineralisation at Kore, Demeter and Chronos.