ASX-listed gold explorers Venus Metals and Rox Resources have launched a major drilling offensive at their joint ventured “Youanmi Regional” project in WA’s central Yilgarn Goldfield. An array of gold prospects on the ground-holdings that fall under the 50:50 joint venture will be the subject of a serious 22,000m aircore drilling campaign consisting of a whopping 540 holes.
The JV says the program will target high-grade gold mineralisation along an 18.5km greenstone corridor – between the well-known Youanmi and Penny gold deposits – that is underlain by sheared and faulted greenstone sequences, mostly under shallow cover.
Following an extensive review of a wealth of historical exploration results generated from the area, including data from drilling, geochemical and geophysical results, JV manager Rox emerged with a swarm of targets over the interpreted 18.5km strike continuation of the Youanmi shear zone and subsidiary faults that host the major gold occurrences in the region.
The main lode shear zone at Youanmi is mineralised over a strike length of more than 2.5km and to a known depth of more than 1km below surface.
Gold is concentrated in north plunging lodes within west-dipping north-west strike shear structures.
The Youanmi gold lodes are invariably associated with quartz-sulphides.
Major gold occurrences in the region are related to subsidiary faults that splay westward from the Youanmi shear zone and are renowned for the high gold grades, the JV says.
Penny gold mineralisation is hosted within large, quartz-sulphide lode veins occurring within a steeply dipping greenstone stratigraphy dominated by mafic and ultramafic units, with minor felsic and granitoid intrusive units.
According to the JV, its newly identified targets are largely untested and known gold spots have been inadequately tested.
Rox Resources Managing Director Alex Passmore said: “We have learnt a lot about the regional geology of the Youanmi belt that has a history of high-grade discoveries but remains substantially under-explored. A thorough regional targeting exercise drawing on both geophysical and geochemical data has identified numerous priority target areas that we are excited to get out and test.”
The aircore drilling blitz will take place across four designated high-priority areas on the Youanmi Regional JV tenements probing interpreted west-north-west trending secondary structures.
These structures take in several demagnetised zones and untested helicopter-borne time-domain electromagnetic conductors that the JV says may represent sulphide-related gold mineralisation.
Drill spacing is planned at 50m to 80m on 400m spaced lines with an average hole depth of about 40m.
Rox says the drilling will penetrate beneath transported cover sequences to test in-situ regolith where past soil sampling and shallow RAB drilling were deemed ineffective.
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By Matt Birney
