ASX-listed gold explorer, Great Southern Mining, looks to have struck paydirt in its first diamond drill hole at its Cox’s Find gold project about 65km north of Laverton in WA, underlining the high-grade aura of the historic project. The Perth-based company returned a bonanza intercept of 1.1m going a whopping 404.0 grams per tonne gold, or an eye-watering 13 ounces to the tonne gold from 164.6m.
The bonanza hit occurred within a wider mineralised zone of 5.65m grading 80 g/t gold from 160.05m, with the drill hole part of the Perth-based company’s current five-hole diamond drilling program.
Cox’s Find was mined between 1937 and 1942 by Western Mining Corporation, producing about 77,000 ounces of gold at an impressive reported head grade of 21.94 g/t from vein stope operations. The Great Southern bonanza drill hole was designed to test the down plunge extension from the historic Cox’s Find workings and intersect the Cox’s Find main lode in areas of high-grade mineralisation that were identified from its RC drilling campaign late last year.
According to Great Southern, the spectacular drill hit is interpreted to be the main lode extension of WMC’s historically mined high-grade quartz lode and correlates with the visible quartz gold vein detected in preliminary investigations of the drill core.
Great Southern Chief Operating Officer, Mark Major said:"This now validates our view that this deposit has an extremely high-grade component to it which requires the application of modern-day exploration techniques to define its extent. We are getting a good indication that the mineralisation is persistent at depth and along strike. The focus now is to trace the high-grade component down plunge along strike to expand the deposit. If we are successful in this next phase, then the full extent of this asset will start to become evident.”
Cox’s Find is located along strike about 12km from Regis Resources’ Garden Well open pit gold mine where Great Southern has been looking to increase its land holdings around prospective structural trends in the area that may present as solid drill targets. It revealed yesterday that it had applied for 50sqkm of additional tenements adjacent to the project in the Duketon greenstone belt.
Assay results for the remaining diamond holes are expected soon.
Great Southern is set to join a conga line of Australian gold players who are successfully resuscitating or hoping to resuscitate historic gold projects as the record gold price spurs them on.
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