ECR Minerals (ECR ) has released results from its latest soil sampling programme at Lolworth project in North Queensland.
The results focus on the Uncle Terry area and provide further evidence that the gold-bearing structural system previously identified through surface exploration and the company's maiden drilling programme potentially extends significantly beyond the areas tested by drilling to date.
Thirty-one soil samples returned gold values of 100 parts per billion gold or greater, including a peak result of 608 ppb gold.
They point to the existence of a broader north-northwest trending gold-bearing structural system extending beyond the drilled area.
A second parallel gold trend has also been identified to the north-east of Uncle Terry, where previous drilling confirmed shallow gold and silver mineralisation, including two metres at 3.57 grams per tonne gold and four metres at 7.18 grams silver.
The results strengthen the case for a broader diamond core drilling programme to test the gold structures at depth and across their interpreted width.
The principal gold trend may extend south towards similarly orientated structures at Gorge Creek West.
"These are highly encouraging results from Lolworth and, importantly, they tell us considerably more than simply where gold is present in the soil,” said ECR chairman Nick Tulloch.
"ECR considers that our maiden drilling programme established that we have a gold-silver mineralised system at Lolworth. What this latest work is now indicating is that the gold component of that system may be considerably broader than the area that we initially drilled, which is an exciting development for the project. Lolworth covers 946 square kilometres, including a significant amount of highly prospective ground, and remains one of the largest exploration opportunities within ECR's portfolio. We have always recognised its potential scale, but as our geological understanding improves, we are beginning to identify increasingly defined structures and clearer targets across the project. The identification of two north-northwest trending gold anomalies, alongside the previously established silver-bearing structures, gives us a much stronger geological framework for the next phase of exploration."
View from Vox
The latest results include more than a thousand samples and provide enough of a dataset to make a compelling case for further diamond drilling, given the potential increase in size and scale. It’s not a bad time to be delineating a major gold project, and at Lolworth ECR certainly seems to be on the right track.