Tenement
The company’s Wardarbie South Project is comprised of a three prospecting licenses (P 51/3025, P 51/3026 and P 51/3027) covering an area of 600Ha. The project is located in the Central Murchison area approximately 75km northwest of the major mining centre of Meekatharra. Access is via the Gascoyne Junction Road and station tracks.
Geological Setting
The region is underlain by the 5-10km wide Mingah Range Greenstone Belt that is bound to the NE and SW by granite and granite gneiss in the northern part of the Archaean Murchison Province of the Yilgarn Craton. Lithologies consist of sediments, felsic volcanics, basalt, dolerite, ultramafic and banded iron formation. Recent alluvial cover overlies much of the area obscuring bedrock geology.
Structural preparation has been extensive with the extension of the Big Bell shear zone imbricating into a number of NW trending shear zones that parallel the enclosing granitoids contacts. These shears also parallel the lithological contacts within the greenstone creating potential traps for mineralisation.
The contact between the granitoids and greenstone strikes NW-SE for 2km through the SW corner of the tenements.
Click to enlarge.
The remainder of the prospect contains weak metaporphised mafic, ultramafic and sedimentary rocks (shales and siltstones with localised silicification).
The Wardarbie South prospect is a cluster of shafts to the east of the project – there are no production records documented. Numerous quartz veins outcropping around the shaft suggest a larger system associated with cross- cutting shears as also observed at other nearby historic gold workings.
A three-kilometre-long contact between mafic and ultramafic lithologies strikes NW-SE through the tenements and forms the focus for gold mineralisation for the Wardarbie South prospect and a number of prospects along strike to the NW. Immediately north, a parallel trend hosts a number of similar gold prospects (Carwell/Zapata etc). These nearby historic workings in the area have a recorded production of 5000oz from narrow quartz lodes. Quartz veins are oriented both parallel to the regional NW trending shear fabric and as cross-cutting structures. The groupings of historic workings overall tend to be oriented in the NW direction and are interpreted as being related to faulting and dilation along lithological contacts. The mineralisation is described as high-grade epigenetic vein deposits. Auriferous quartz veins up to 1m wide, striking for several hundred metres have been described in the area, in places associated with stockworks related to shearing. Anomalous base metal assays (Cu, Pb, Zn) have been returned from quartz vein sampling.
Previous Exploration
The region has been explored both for gold and nickel since the 1960’s. Most work was focussed on finding large open-pittable gold resources and hence broad spaced sampling methods were utilised. Regional wide-spaced aircore and RAB drilling by a number of explorers was completed before the year 2000. Since then a number of explorers have identified the potential for gold mineralisation but no systematic work was completed on the leases.
There is no drilling specifically targeting the Wardarbie South workings or the prospective NW trending structural corridor given the focus of many explorers was not on small to medium size high grade mineralisation. Recent sampling of the workings around Wardarbie South returned grades of 33.7, 22.0g/t, 11.8g/t 5.7g/t and 4.9g/t Au reinforcing the potential for high grade mineralisation.
Exploration Programme
Only limited work has been completed on the tenement and hence it is a grass roots project. Following data compilation, geophysical surveys are planned to better define the structural corridors under the extensive alluvial cover. RAB or aircore drilling programmes will be necessary to define anomalous geochemistry – particularly focussed on any geophysical targets and the sheared lithological contacts. RC drilling will be used to test encouraging gold anomalism defined by these programmes.