Titan has kicked off maiden reconnaissance drilling aimed at validating historical results from two diamond holes drilled in 1978 at the Copper Duke project in Ecuador.
These holes were drilled by the United Nations to find molybdenum but wound up intersecting gold with the first hole.
Core from Titan Minerals’ (ASX:TTM) first diamond hole, which tested an interpreted magnetic target proximal to one of those historical holes, is visually encouraging with signs of the common pathfinders – such as pyrite veining – for gold mineralisation.
“It is gratifying to finally be able to schedule two drill holes at Copper Duke before the end of this drill season,” managing director Laurie Marsland said.
“Our objectives in this short program are modest with the objective of validating previous data and collecting core to analyse and prepare for more detailed strategy.
“We will also get to test a newly identified geophysical anomaly which will provide great information on geology, alteration and structures controlling the magnetic features beneath more than 1.5km by 6km corridor of gold-copper mineralisation mapped at surface.”
Much to discover at Copper Duke
The first of two holes totalling a planned 540m that the company is drilling before the onset of the wet season curtails access was drilled to follow up on the SON-02 well that hit a depth of 220m and returned an assay of 45.4m grading 1.9 grams per tonne (g/t) gold from surface.
Notably, only the top 62.75m of the historical hole was assayed for gold and silver, meaning that nothing is known of what was intersected beyond that point.
As such, Titan plans to deepen its first hole HTD001 to a depth of about 300m to test the source of 291m of magnetic anomalism highlighted in 3D inversion modelling of the high-resolution magnetic datasets generated earlier this year.
Its second hole will be drilled 1.5km to the southeast on a sub-parallel trend of magnetic anomalies associated with relatively higher gold grades and increasing vein density noted in surface mapping and sampling to the southeast in the El Huato target.
Other work is also continuing with the company close to completing a soil survey that will increase its soil geochemistry coverage over Copper Duke by about 300%.
It has also collected an additional 270 rock chip samples along with completing over 1,900m of channel sampling in the process of ground truthing the geophysical interpretations of magnetic and radiometric data.
This article was developed in collaboration with Titan Minerals, 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.