Cosmo Metals (ASX:CMO) has extended its footprint at the Nundle Goldfield, with confirmation of a cumulative strike length of about 2.5km at the Folly Line gold trend identified in a light detection and ranging (LiDAR) survey.
Future work proposed for the Nundle Goldfield portion of the Nundle Project will involve initial ground truthing of the full extent of the gold mineralised areas and lines of hard rock lodes identified from the detailed LiDAR survey in parallel with the continued compilation, verification and analysis of historical exploration data.
The company says a clear early focus of this work will be the extensive but underexplored Hanging Rock area of hard rock lodes, deep lead mineralisation, and alluvials, where records indicate that there has been no modern drill testing.
This work will also assess the extension of the extensive deep leads under the capping younger basalts and the assessment of potential hard rock sources that are not exposed and therefore were not exploited by the historical mining operations.
Cosmo expects this work will lead to systematic rock chip sampling and geological mapping of accessible priority target areas with the aim of defining drill targets.
The balance of the detailed LiDAR coverage over Nundle, expected to be received imminently, will be subject to the same high level of interpretation and analysis as the preliminary Nundle Goldfield data set, with the results of this work to be released in due course.
The aforementioned survey has received 90km2 worth of preliminary data from the total 259km2 area that was tested in April, recognising over 240 historical shafts and pits.
The company believes it has the potential to extend the trend a further 1.7km towards the Zwers Scheelite-Antimony mine, which has a historical production of more than 4.3 tonnes of antimony.
Between Trevena and the Gap, Cosmo, which has a market capitalisation of $5.15 million, also noted a 1km long structural jog with parallel lines of previous workings and mappings, which returned multi-gram gold results.
Over at the Hanging Rock field, the company believes it has defined “significant” alluvial and deep lead gold mining, with a strike length of 6.7km of lines of lode, as well as over 550 historical shafts and pits.
Managing Director Ian Prentice says historical records indicate that more than 300,000 ounces of gold and 4.3 tonnes of antimony has been recovered from shallow workings, deep leads, and alluvials from the Nundle Goldfield.
Prentice says this latest work delivers a significant step forward in the company’s understanding of the prospectivity of this underexplored goldfield.
“Ground truthing of these zones along with the ongoing interpretation of historic exploration results is expected to generate compelling targets in an area which is remarkable for its lack of exploration drilling,” he adds.
Cosmo Metals is a gold and base metals explorer, focused on the development of its projects across Western Australia and New South Wales.
Write to Maddison Elliott at Mining.com.au
Images: Cosmo Metals
