Meeka Metals has bumped its total Murchison gold project resource up to 12.7 million tonnes at 3 grams per tonne for 1.215 million ounces of gold after revealing an initial oxide gold resource from its St Anne’s deposit.
The St Annes resource of 270,000 tonnes at 2.8g/t gold for 25,000 ounces is viewed by the company as conservative as it is entirely constrained by a price of $2600 per ounce of gold pit shells and all in the indicated resource category.
The initial St Anne’s resource will be included in its Murchison prefeasibility study, which is set to be released in June.
St Anne’s is a shallow high-grade oxide gold deposit with no previous mining and is open at depth and to the south. The potential for underground mining is considered likely by the company, subject to further successful drilling.
Its resource is based on 38,000m of drilling over a 550m strike length to a depth of 90m. Drill spacing was about 20m by 20m, giving management a high degree of confidence in the prospect’s potential.
Meeka is continuing to drill targets in a 25km-long Fairway shear zone, which it describes as an economically-important zone of shearing and high strain within the Archean Gnaweeda greenstone belt that hosts more than 700,000 ounces of gold resources at the company’s Turnberry and St Anne’s deposits. Further assays from the drilling are expected this month.
Meeka managing director Tim Davidson said: “Over the 6 months to December 2022, drilling identified shallow, high-grade oxide gold at St Anne’s and we quickly moved to determine a high-confidence Indicated Mineral Resource. This decision was strategic, given we knew shallow high-grade oxide material would be a valuable addition to our upcoming Pre-feasibility Study.”
St Anne’s boasts a 98 per cent gold recovery with average gravity recovery of more than 49 per cent from metallurgical testwork 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 deposit is centrally located in the Archaean Gnaweeda Greenstone Belt, which is up to 10km wide in the northern half and decreases to less than 1km in the south. The greenstone belt is situated along the northern-most extent of two main structural lineaments bounding the Murchison and Southern Cross domains – the Evanstone-Edale and the Youanmi shear zones, which are both associated with gold occurrences in the sandstone-greenstone belt sequence.
St Anne’s has transported cover to a depth of 20m and weathered rock extends down to 100m below surface. Meeka has interpreted the geology of the deposit as hosting mineralisation along a north/north-east-trending shear zone.
Several north-west/south-east structures are interpreted from geophysics to crosscut and offset the stratigraphy and mineralisation, which is described as widespread and occurring within multiple mineralised envelopes, but predominantly concentrated within the mafic rocks proximal to lithology contacts.
St Anne’s clearly has room to grow and Meeka is drilling various other prospects to build momentum for a possible mine development at its Murchison gold project. With resources already in excess of 1.2 million ounces of gold at a healthy 3g/t, this project could churn out some good numbers in the prefeasibility study due in June.
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By Terry Bates
