Castle Minerals has identified lithium anomalism in pegmatite rock chip sampling across a priority target at its Woodcutters project in Western Australia’s Goldfields region, with six responses reading from 60.7 parts per million lithium up to 111.2ppm.
The target across a zone of about 1km had previously been identified through soil sampling and the company says its latest work has broadened the area of lithium anomalism.
Castle says its 10km-long north-west/south-east trend of lithium soil anomalism defined by regular, grid-based soil sampling comprises a single high priority, in addition to four medium targets and up to 14 lower-priority zones of anomalism. It adds that the trend appears to coincide with the same structural zone and prospective metasediments that host the Bald Hill lithium-tantalum mine just 25km to the north-west.
The company’s rock chip sampling was undertaken across several poorly-exposed pegmatite outcrops within the trend, with an initial focus on the single high-priority area of soil anomalism. All rock chip samples collected from existing and recently-identified pegmatitic outcrops returned lithium anomalism.
We are very pleased with this latest round of focused rock chip sampling at the Woodcutters Lithium project, near Norseman, Western Australia which has located additional pegmatites anomalous in lithium in a largely soil covered terrane. There are several other areas of lithium-in-soils anomalism that have yet to be evaluated within the overall 410km2 Woodcutters tenure. These have been highlighted by the reprocessing of a regional-scale, multi-element soil sampling database collected as part of a historical purely gold-focused campaign, so there is plenty of work still to do at Woodcutters. Castle Minerals managing director Stephen Stone
The company says it obtained five other lower-order responses ranging from 3.5ppm lithium to 10ppm from rock chips at four other soil anomalies in the south-east of the soil sampling grid.
Management points out that the anomalous soil and rock chip results occur along a significant interpreted boundary between Archean granites and metasedimentary rocks and that two of the samples also assayed tin responses of 14.6ppm and 16.4ppm tin and 3.3ppm and 3.68ppm tantalum. It believes that would support the possibility of mineralised granitic fluid fractionation and emplacement into adjacent metasediments and increase the potential of finding lithium-bearing pegmatites hidden beneath the extensive soil cover.
A specialist review, commissioned by Castle, of historical sampling and multi-element assay gold exploration data collected by AngloGold Ashanti between 2009 and 2010 identified several other zones of lithium and associated rubidium, beryllium, caesium and tin anomalism, which warrant further evaluation.
Management says the prospectivity of Woodcutters is further enhanced by its proximity to the Bald Hill lithium-tantalum mine, which is currently being acquired by Mineral Resources, and to Liontown Resource’s Buldania lithium deposit that sits 25km to the south-west and is now subject to a takeover offer by Albermarle.
It says Castle’s next steps will be to broaden the search for and sampling of outcropping or shallow-buried pegmatites within the structural trend of interest, ahead of a confirmatory drilling program.
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