North Stawell Minerals’ drilling continues to bear fruit, with the company revealing new significant gold intercepts extending to the north and south of the Forsaken prospect in the multi-million-ounce Stawell region.

North Stawell Minerals (ASX:NSM) is quickly proving the significant prospectivity of yet another of its many targets in Victoria’s historic goldfields, news that bumped shares up nearly 8% to an intra-day peak of 14c on Thursday.

The company has again unveiled what could potentially be a repeat of the geology that hosts the 5Moz Stawell mine.

An 18-hole, 1548m aircore drilling program at the Forsaken prospect has extended the mineralisation to the north and south along the western margin of a 9km interpreted basalt.

“The basalt margin (clearly defined in NSM’s AGG gravity-gradiometry geophysics but not in historic magnetics data) is a possible repeat of the geology that hosts the multi-million-ounce Stawell Mine, 40km along strike to the south,” CEO Russell Krause emphasised.

“At Stawell, gold-bearing fluids are focused into flexures of faults and shears as they wrap around the immovable buttress of basalt. At the northern end of Forsaken the basalt is interpreted as a being dragged into the regionally significant Pleasant Creek Fault, forming a large, 2km wide fold.

“Fault-fold systems are recognised as geometries conducive to focusing gold mineralisation, potentially increasing prospectivity at Forsaken.”

Significant hits from the phase-two program include 3m at 1.02 grams per tonne (g/t) gold from 62m in hole NSAC0586 and 3m at 1.98g/t from 51m in hole NSAC0595.

“Despite the modest step-out, this hole [NSAC0595] has achieved the critical result of demonstrating gold mineralisation south of the historic diamond hole, opens up 4km of interpreted basalt contact to continued exploration,” Krause said.

“The contiguous anomalous trend has been extended to 500m and is open north and south.”

Historic aircore drilling at the Forsaken prospect included a standout result of 10m at 1.34g/t gold.

Krause said this impressive result was followed up by a 210.4m diamond hole, which did not return any significant assays, with the prospect subsequently “forsaken”.

But with new high-resolution data in hand, a valuable tool in NSM’s strategy, NSM returned to the target last year, drilling 31 holes for 1671m which intersected significant mineralisation 70m north of the historic standout drill hole.

“Gold anomalism in historic drilling follows the margin of the basalt around the interpreted fold and into the western limb of the structure, suggesting this contact may be highly prospective in multiple areas,” Krause noted.

“NSM has rapidly focused on, and efficiently expanded, the Forsaken target.

“The supporting geophysics and mineralisation models have helped focus effective exploration and identify targets, and exploration will continue to expand this target along strike and to depth.”

Potential for multiple Stawell lookalikes

This is not the first prospect that has shown strong similarities to the Stawell mine in the gold-rich Stawell Corridor of Victoria.

In May, NSM reported extremely promising results from aircore drilling of the Challenger prospect that indicated it was the equivalent of the upper reaches of the ore system mined and studied at the Stawell mine.

Prior to that drilling at the Darlington prospect returned high-grade, well-defined mineralisation that was also similar to that at the Stawell mine.

The Caledonia prospect could also be a repeat of Stawell, with drilling earlier this year returning more significant intersections that doubled the gold trend, just 570m south of past mining that delivered grades of over 15g/t.

NSM has amassed a pipeline of over 60 potential targets in the Stawell Corridor and has been busy taking a closer look at 20 of the highest priority targets.

 

 

 

This article was developed in collaboration with North Stawell 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.