Terrain Minerals has identified traces of sulphides and alteration in samples in a maiden drilling program at the company’s Larin’s Lane deposit in Western Australia’s Mid West region after plunging 101 drill holes for 6611m.
The company says the campaign within its 100 per cent-owned Smokebush project was aimed at testing the bedrock under previously-defined mobile metal ion (MMI) copper, nickel and gold anomalies across three priority areas at the prospect. The anomalies were established during soil sampling earlier this year and management is now eagerly awaiting the assay results.
The first of the soil programs kicked off in February this year and identified a big, new gold anomaly dubbed “Target 1”, which extends some 700m long and 250m wide. It also outlined the open copper and associated nickel anomaly, “Target 3”, which stretches 600m by 350m and is open to the south-east.
The work was enhanced by an MMI extension soil program in August that identified a new 900m-by-400m nickel-copper-gold-silver anomaly known as “Target 4”, which is open to the south-east. It extended Target 3 by a further 500m in length and showed common areas of overlap between the elevated element haloes.
The Larin’s Lane prospect sits in the south-east corner of Smokebush, which sits about 350km north of Perth and 65km west of the historic Payne’s Find. Established from regional magnetics, it is interpreted to be an Archaean greenstone sliver wedged between two monzogranites and is some 4km long and 300m to 400m wide.
Geologically, the area is a complex sequence of folded and regionally-metamorphosed Archaean greenstones, with multiple stages of granitic intrusions.
Larin’s Lane has been interpreted to be part of the southern end of the Yalgoo-Singleton greenstone belt that plays host to the whopping Golden Grove copper-gold-silver-zinc-lead mine. It sits in a well-established district of mining, with Minjar Gold about 40km to the north, the Deflector Mine some 100km to the north-west and the Mt Mulgine tungsten deposit a mere 8km to 10km from Larin’s Lane.
Smokebush consists of various exploration and prospecting licenses that not only host Larin’s Lane, but also several other exploration targets prospective for gold, rare earths and lithium that have been revealed from induced-polarisation-generated anomalies. First pass drilling to follow up the anomalies was completed in July and has since uncovered high-grade gold mineralisation at the Lightning deposit, showing 2m at 6.22 grams per tonne gold from 61m.
Lightning sits adjacent to the company’s Monza prospect, which showed historical reverse-circulation (RC) drill intercepts of 4m at 4.45g/t gold from 51m. Additionally, some incredible zones of gallium mineralisation were uncovered from the work at the Rabbit Warren and Paradice City prospects, giving intersections of 10m at 37.6g/t gallium oxide and 9m at 30.9g/t.
Gallium is considered a crucial element in the defence and advance electronics industries, with China the dominant global supplier and producing 98 per cent of the world’s supply. However, the goalposts were changed on August 1 when China introduced strict export bans on the critical rare earths metal.
With some sound exploration under its belt for the year covering an array of commodities in the Smokebush project alone, Terrain is awaiting the results from its maiden drilling at the Larin’s Lane prospect. And the company is hoping the results are a just taste of what is to come.
But one should never take the eyes off the prize and the gallium exploration will be one to watch, especially given China’s restrictions on supply.
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