Marmota stretches SA gold drilling blitz beyond 2km as assays approach
Marmota Limited's (ASX: MEU) share price has rose more than 143 per cent to 7.4 cents per share this morning on news it has now expanded the drilling program beyond two kilometres at its new high-grade Greenewood gold discovery in South Australia’s Gawler Craton. According to management, the first batch of assays from the campaign could hit the streetsas early as next week.
The company says its extensional drilling to the north and south of Greenewood has intersected more zones with favourable geology that appears almost identical to other areas within Greenewood which have previously delivered a string of outstanding gold hits.
The encouraging signs have prompted management to extend the program, with drilling now expected to wrap up in early October. The move sets the stage for a steady news flow, with Marmota anticipating a series of results announcements over the coming weeks as they come back from the lab.
Key objectives of the program are to extend Greenewood in both directions, especially to the north and also in depth, and to flesh out the intervening strike between Greenewood and Mainwood, to build a combined resource. It is also designed to increase the of drilling density, including in missing sections, to support an indicated resource estimate and a follow-up scoping study.
The current program has already completed 313 new holes, comprising 110 holes at the Greenewood zone and another 203 holes into its southern extension into the zone known as Mainwood, a combined system that now looks to command a strike distance of more than two kilometres.
The recently launched Mainwood component of the drilling represents Marmota’s maiden program in that zone and is the first time any drill bit has probed Mainwood since 2018.
Marmota’s Greenewood project sits in a revered geological address, being located about 30 kilometres northeast of the Barton Gold's historical million-ounce-plus Challenger gold mine - now under care and maintenance but being developed - and 35km northwest of the company’s own flagship Aurora Tank gold deposit.
Interestingly, Marmota says the discovery of Greenewood is an important milestone in the region’s exploration history because it lacks the characteristic surface gold-in-calcrete gold anomalism that led to the discovery of Challenger and other deposits scattered along what the company calls its extensive “Arc of Gold”.
Management believes this could point to potential for further discoveries in areas that may have been overlooked - or simply missed - by traditional sampling techniques, including those that may have relied solely on calcrete sampling across the region.
The Greenewood and Mainwood prospects form part of the Golden Moon joint venture, in which Marmota holds a 90 per cent interest. The company says the new discoveries’ proximity to its 100 per cent-owned Aurora Tank deposit creates obvious economies of scale and operational synergies.
The Aurora Tank deposit has already landed outstanding gold intersections, including bonanza grades close to surface , and has demonstrated superb metallurgical recoveries with potential for a low-cost open pit heap leach operation.
The company's latest work is unfolding against an ongoing bullish backdrop for the yellow metal, following its all-time high of A$7894 per ounce in January this year, then holding above A$6000 per ounce to date, fuelling interest in new, near-surface discoveries.
This hunt is being actively encouraged in South Australia, with the state government backing early-stage exploration through its renewed Plan for Accelerating Exploration (PACE) minerals initiative to drive the next wave of mineral discoveries across the state.
The combination of recent heady exploration activity and results, including Marmota's own crop of high-grade successes, has drawn fresh attention to the broader Gawler Craton, with new copper-gold and gold targets being promoted across the region.
These include Inflection Resources, which recently secured its 2660- square- kilometre Fortitude Project near the Olympic Dam iron oxide - copper gold (IOCG) province. Inflection where the company has since mapped out seven high-priority, undrilled targets - six focused on copper-gold and one targeting pure gold.
Meanwhile, Barton Gold is pressing ahead with a major gold production hub-and-spoke strategy in the central region, accelerating its development timelines to feed its central Challenger mill processing hub from resources at the company's its massive Tunkillia gold deposit and the nearby high-grade Tarcoola gold field.
Indiana Resources is also actively exploring the massive, 100%-owned 5,000- square- kilometre footprint of its Gawler Craton pProject in the region, using where it is maintaining continuous aircore and RC drilling campaigns to targeting both large-scale gold systems and base-metal/copper targets.
With Marmota's maiden scoping study for its wider Gawler gold project already underway, any success from the current drilling at Greenewood and Mainwood should to fit neatly into the company’s development plans.
With drilling continuing and first results from its latest 313-hole campaign just around the corner, the next few weeks could prove telling for Marmota as it looks to build a critical mass of gold resources in one of South Australia’s premier gold belts.
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