ASX listed Southern Gold has been granted two exploration tenements over the large Beopseongpo gold-silver epithermal target in south western South Korea.
The project is located about 40km east northeast of Gwangju city in the southern Jeolla Province that hosts several known gold occurrences including the operating Eunsan-Moisan gold mine to the South where the company is hoping to discover epithermal gold-silver deposits.
Southern Gold management said this week that detailed ground assessment work late in 2017, identified Beopseongpo as one of several very prospective epithermal gold-silver targets with no known drilling to date.
According to the company, Beopseongpo currently has a 4km traceable strike length, 1m plus vein widths within a 30m wide alteration zone and preserved mineralised vein intervals, suggesting that it is an extensive low-sulphidation epithermal gold-silver system.
Recent rock chip sampling of vein outcrops and float materials returned grades of up to 21.8 grams per tonne gold and 19g/t silver from float materialS and 3g/t gold and 1g/t silver from outcropping material.
Southern Gold Managing Director Simon Mitchell said: “I am very excited by the granting of tenure at Beopseongpo as this is a first class gold-silver target and allows for more thorough surface mapping and sampling along strike and to conduct scout diamond drilling. The target here is probably about 150m below surface so would have been missed by the historic miners.”
“Beopseongpo has the potential to be a very large system. The work by a world expert consultant in epithermal systems indicates that this discovery on surface is relatively high in the epithermal system model and could represent an opportunity for a bonanza-grade system at depth given the textures that are analogous to the top zones of the Gladstone-Favona vein system.”
Southern Gold plans to carry out project scale lithology, alteration and geo-structural mapping of granted tenure for the first stage of exploration at Beopseongpo.
Regional mapping and sampling will set out the targets for a maiden diamond core drilling program to test vein continuity and define veining trends and quartz vein textural variations to vector towards significant gold-silver mineralization targets at depth.
A preliminary scout diamond drill program has been designed to test the mineralisation model down dip and confirm strike continuity.
Southern Gold has been rapidly building a portfolio of solid gold tenements in South Korea where it has a mixture of greenfields exploration plays and lucrative looking old gold mines that are still harbouring significant gold resources.
Southern Gold’s JV partner for the historical Gubong and Kochang gold mines, London listed Bluebird Merchant Ventures, is earning a 50% equity interest by farming-in with a spend of USD$1m, as part of its feasibility studies on the historic mining projects.
Bluebird is set to deliver a feasibility report outlining preferred re-development options to advance the combined Gubong and Kochang projects with an expected capital cost of less than USD$10m.
