Meeka Metals is bringing modern techniques to historical areas at its Murchison gold project with high impact drilling targeting the 25km long greenstone hosted Fairway shear zone.
The Fairway zone is a largely untested economically important zone of shearing and high strain in the Archean Gnaweeda greenstone belt hosting Meeka’s 700,000 ounce Turnberry gold deposit. The company’s St Anne’s gold deposit also lies in the zone and has a mineral resource estimate scheduled for release in April.
A detailed pre-feasibility study for the project including St Anne’s is on track for a June quarter delivery.
Meeka says approximately 90 per cent of 25km long the Fairway shear zone has had either no drilling or ineffective, broad spaced rotary air-blast or air-core reconnaissance drilling.
Meeka Metals managing director Tim Davidson said: “This program will target areas where ineffective broad spaced historical drilling intersected strong coincident gold-arsenic anomalies but were not followed up. This approach proved highly successful in 2022 when we targeted gold-arsenic anomalism at St Anne’s and discovered extensive, shallow, high-grade gold. We are looking to build on that success and add further high value ounces to our mineral resource.”
The latest campaign is targeting shallow high-grade gold mineralisation within the Fairway shear zone which is comprised of a sheared assemblage of mafic rocks representing an economically important zone of gold mineralisation within the Gnaweeda greenstone belt. The company has ranked a series of gold targets based on gold-arsenic geochemical anomalies and geophysical signatures. The program will focus on five high ranked targets with 12,000m of RC drilling planned.
Meeka has already released a 700,000-ounce resource estimate for Turnberry and a figure for St Anne’s is due in April. Total project resources stand at 12.4 million tonnes at 3 grams per tonne gold for 1.2 million ounces. Importantly, all of the current resources stand on granted mining leases.
Meeka claims control of most of the Archean Gnaweeda greenstone belt within its 281 square km of tenements.
The company’s St Anne’s deposit boasts a 98 per cent gold recovery from metallurgical test work and some very high-grade gold hits including 32m at 16.07g/t gold from 48m and 20m grading 20.74g/t gold also from 48m downhole.
The previous scoping study for its Murchison gold project released in December 2021 outlined an economically robust gold project producing over 420,000 ounces of gold. The company is edging towards gold production whilst pumping metres into high quality gold targets to grow its gold resources even further.
Meeka also has a finger in the Esperance rare earths pie and is currently awaiting assays from infill drilling at its large Circle Valley project in southern WA. An initial mineral resource for the rare earths project is planned for June.
However, the explorer has also identified four gold prospects at it Circle Valley project in the Albany-Fraser mobile belt northeast of Esperance, the Tropicana gold mine with over 3 million ounces of production sits in the same belt.
Meeka’s also holds the Cascade rare earths project covers 2269 sq km in the rapidly emerging clay-hosted rare earths province. Importantly, the company says the results to date contain high levels of the permanent magnet metals neodymium and praseodymium within thick near surface mineralised zones. Metallurgical test work and drilling are ongoing with an initial mineral resource estimate being planned for late in 2023.
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By Terry Bates
