Panther Metals is working the drill bit at its Ironstone prospect, part of the company’s larger Merolia project near Laverton in Western Australia. The explorer says its 1200m diamond drilling program is aimed at testing historic mineralisation and modelling the target’s main lode.
Earlier work in the area delivered a peak intercept of 9m at 22.27 grams per tonne gold from 112m with a higher-grade 4m parcel running 46.20 g/t or over 1.6 ounces gold to the tonne.
Despite the exploration marking Panther’s first foray at the prospect, Ironstone has seen its fair share of work over the years.
In 2002 mega miner AngloGold Ashanti plunged 19 RC and two diamond holes at the prospect. The exercise proved successful in delineating a few high-grade strikes, including the 22.27 and 46.20 g/t intercepts.
Subsequent work by another ASX-listed explorer, White Cliff Minerals, unlocked more of the ground’s riches with early phase drilling laying bare some of the zone’s interesting geology, quartz veining and crucially, more significant gold hits.
In 2016, White Cliff completed a 5-hole RC program that confirmed the results of AngloGold’s campaign and was followed by a soil sampling exercise that led to the detection of a 240m x 180m anomaly.
The discovery led to 20 air-core holes being bored at the prospect. The program turned up a suite of wide-scale precious metal patches from shallow depths that interestingly remain both open at depth and along strike.
Results from the air-core program delivered grades as high as 1.8 g/t gold.
Panther arrives at the new campaign in stunning form as it looks to drill test and verify the mineralisation struck by the ground’s previous explorers.
The company comes with the hot hand at Ironstone following a phase 1 diamond campaign at the nearby Burtville East prospect, also part of the Merolia project. The campaign delivered a raft of spectacular results including 15m at 53.9 g/t gold and a number of 1m intervals going 478, 125.5, 79.9 and 73.3 g/t gold respectively.
The company is now looking to build on those numbers with a phase 2, RC program at Burtville East by month’s end.
Panther says its work at Burtville East has so far unveiled a shallow, high-grade zone that could potentially feed a number of under-capacity mills around the region.
Burtville East is within the Laverton greenstone belt and East Yilgarn craton. Management considers the ground highly prospective and largely unexplored.
The East Yilgarn Craton boasts a total gold endowment of more than 27 million ounces and also takes in the 2.7-million-ounce Granny Smith deposit about 30km from Burtville East.
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