Surefire has used a historical data review to light up 15 priority gold and nickel targets at its newly granted Perenjori West tenure, 300km northeast of Perth.
The under explored tenure lies within the West Yilgarn nickel-copper-PGE province that has been the recent focus of intense exploration following the discovery of Chalice Mining’s world-class Julimar PGE deposit.
Management says despite the area’s productive history, many of the highly prospective anomalies peppered across the Perenjori west tenement remained untested by previous explorers due to a sluggish gold price at the time.
Past pioneers of the region, including Anaconda, Sons of Gwalia, BHP and CRA, focused their efforts on targeting volcanogenic hosted massive sulphide mineralisation in felsic volcanics analogous to the nearby high-grade Golden Grove deposit richly endowed in copper, lead, zinc, silver and gold.
The company’s tenure covers a largely concealed greenstone of the Koolanooka Greenstone Belt in the southern Murchison geological province of the Yilgarn Craton.
Before the Julimar nickel-PGE discovery, historical exploration failed to recognise the presence and distribution of mafic and ultramafic lithologies prospective for gold and nickel mineralisation.
Surefire says a reinterpretation of publicly-available aeromagnetic data has highlighted a package of mafic rocks, including a suite of likely intrusive mafic-ultramafic lithologies like those hosting the Julimar nickel-PGE deposit, along the western portion of the greenstone belt.
Additionally, the company has identified multiple felsic and mafic intrusive rocks prospective for porphyry intrusive related gold mineralisation along with several regionally significant north-west faults that could act as a conduit for channelling gold mineralisation.
In conjunction with the aeromagnetic interpretation, an assessment of previous soil geochemical sampling by Surefire yielded 15 priority gold and base metal targets.
Bulk Leach Extractable Gold, or BLEG sampling in the 1980s delivered solid gold grades on and in the vicinity of a pair of lithological contacts and a major fault zone that cuts across the Perenjori West tenement. The anomalous gold-in-soil results remain largely untested.
The new ground sits 100km from Surefire’s Yidby Road gold deposit, where the company recently intersected broad zones of sulphides through an RC drilling campaign.
The work at Yidby saw Surefire sink 22 RC holes totalling 2298m to extend its existing deposit.
The best results included a 13m intersection running 1.33 grams per tonne gold from 234m including a 2m section grading 3.88 g/t gold from the same depth. The project lies adjacent to the over one million-ounce Minjar gold project in WA.
Surefire has kicked off its first boots on ground field reconnaissance program at Perenjori West aimed at scoping out the gold-in-soil anomalies with further surface geochemical sampling surveys slated ahead of future drill testing.
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By Matt Birney
