Hi Ho, Hi Ho, it’s off to work we go
THE DRILL SERGEANT: Each week any number of junior exploration plays set out to drill their ground. Here’s a small selection of what’s been happening this week.
Resource Development Drilling
Ausgold (ASX: AUC) has drilling scheduled to commence at the company’s Katanning gold project, on the Dingo and Jinkas projects during late March.
Ausgold proposes a program of approximately 6,000m of RC at the Jinkas and Dingo deposits, the program comprises approximately 4,000m of infill RC drilling at Jinkas on traverses through higher grade mineralisation to the north-east of the historic Jinkas North open cut, and 2,000m of drilling around the Dingo open pit.
This drilling is designed to upgrade existing inferred and indicated resources to measure and indicated status’ respectively and to increase confidence in the measured resource.
Drilling at Fairwater nickel project
Pioneer Resources (ASX: PIO) has commenced drilling at the company’s 75 per cent-owned Fairwater nickel project in the Albany Fraser Orogen in south eastern Western Australia.
The drill program will consist of up to 99 aircore holes at the FWNi003 nickel anomaly, within the Fairwater project.
The FWNi003 target area is sand-covered, and the drilling will enable the company to identify geological units and appraise subsurface geochemistry.
Pioneer is exploring for mafic-intrusion hosted nickel sulphide deposits at the Fairwater project, similar to the major, high-grade Nova and Bollinger nickel discoveries of Sirius Resources (ASX: SIR) in the region.
The drill program is expected to take three weeks and final results will be released as soon as they are available, which is expected to be in April.
Zanthus Drilling on Schedule
Rumble Resources’ (ASX: RTR) high impact drill program targeting five bedrock conductors at the Zanthus project is on schedule for late March 2015.
The program will consist of five RC holes targeting the five bedrock conductors which may represent magmatic massive nickel sulphides.
Rumble considers conductors Zc1, 2 and 3 to be of significant conductance and as such represent first order drill targets in the Fraser Range.
They are located in and around an ‘eye’ intrusive feature interpreted as an elliptical magnetic rimmed intrusive body some 2km in length and up to 1km wide and of similar size to Sirius Resources’ Nova ‘eye’ feature.
Rumble’s Zanthus project is located 20km east of the Nova-Bollinger nickel copper massive sulphide discoveries in the Fraser Range, Western Australia.
Rumble is earning up to 75 per cent from Blackham Resources (ASX: BLK).
“The recent drilling success of our Fraser Range peers [Sirius Resources, Mount Ridley Mines] highlights the potential of the Fraser Range to host another major nickel discovery,” Rumble Resources CEO Shane Sikora said.
“First order drilling targets are significant bedrock conductors within intrusions which may represent massive sulphide accumulations.
“Rumble is on schedule to drill five shallow bedrock conductors in and around an eye intrusive feature 20 kilometres from the Nova-Bollinger massive nickel sulphide deposit in late March.
“The Fraser Range is underexplored and we believe has the potential to host a significant number of nickel deposits similar to that in Canada which is host to multiple world class deposits.
“Drilling multiple bedrock conductors takes us one step closer to finding the next major nickel discovery.”