Meeka Metals has revealed it has completed a gravity survey over 7km of strike of the Fairway shear zone which includes its St Anne’s and Turnberry prospects. The objective was to define the denser mafic rocks which are the principal hosts to known mineralisation in its prospects in the Gnaweeda greenstone belt in WA.
Turnberry features a current mineral resource estimate of 10,652,950 tonnes at a solid average grade of 2.0g/t for a contained 685,000 ounces gold. It is centred about 4km north of St Anne’s which has a current resource of 277,710 tonnes at 2.8g/t gold for a contained 25,000 ounces of gold.
Both areas lie about 500m east of the Fairway shear zone and several higher-grade intercepts have been recorded in a few scattered drillholes between them, including grades up to 2.4g/t gold.
Their proximity to a major shear, the current well-defined resource zones and parallel strike to the adjacent controlling major shear all point to the intervening and extension zones north and south of both the resource areas as priority targets which might have the legs to bolster the current resource areas.
With the completion of the gravity survey, the company says it has kicked off a new round of drilling with two objectives, of which its priority task is 5,500m of infill drilling and an extensional reverse circulation (RC) program now underway targeting shallow, thinly drilled areas on the margins of Turnberry to infill and extend the resource.
Once the initial Turnberry work is completed, additional drilling is planned to follow up on geophysical and gold-arsenic geochemical anomalies within the Fairway Shear Zone immediately to the north and south of Turnberry.
Meeka says it expects to begin receiving assay results from the program in early November.
The company’s Murchison gold project is 100 per cent owned by Meeka and lies in close to several multi-million-ounce gold mines. The company’s tenure in the historic Murchison Gold Fields covers a combined 281 square kilometres of the northern extent of the highly prospective Mount Magnet and Youanmi shear zones and represents its flagship project, hosting a large high-grade combined JORC compliant resource of over 1.2 million ounces of gold.
The company says it is actively exploring to expand the resource base while also moving toward production, as outlined in its July Murchison gold project feasibility study which details its development strategy.
The study anticipates recovered gold production of 663,000 ounces of gold over an initial 9.3-year project, which is currently underpinned by its core, high-grade Probable Ore Reserve of 4.12 million tonnes at 3.1g/t gold for 410,000 ounces gold Au.
The company says it is now progressing all remaining environmental studies necessary to acquire permits for the project and investigating other opportunities to accelerate its development timeline through low capital options which include such strategies as toll milling of higher-grade starter pits and scalable processing.
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By Doug Bright
