Shares in Marmota Ltd (ASX: MEU) are up nearly 50% after the company announced "spectacular" gold grades at its Greenewood project.
The company on Thursday reported the first assays from exploration at the Greenewood project in South Australia.
The company reported results including 33m at 10 grams per tonne of gold from a depth of 22m, and 94 grams per tonne of gold at a depth of 66m.
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Exceptional drilling results
The company said in a statement to the ASX that the results were some of the best ever returned from exploration programs in South Australia.
As the company said in the statement to the ASX:
The drilling has clearly delineated a nearly-continuous high-grade mineralised system over 900m in strike. The mineralisation remains open along strike. The results feature multiple bonanza gold grades, close to surface, with excellent continuity along strike, and including exceptional thick high-grade intersections. The results are some of the best seen in the Gawler Craton since the discovery of the Challenger deposit in 1995.
The company said the detailed assay results took longer to receive from the laboratory than expected.
This is because the gold assays include results that are so high that they exceeded the upper limits of the laboratory standard fire-assay testing framework, and had to be re-assayed using alternative methodologies specially designed to robustly assay extremely high-grade gold samples.
The Greenewood project is about 35km northwest of Marmota's flagship Aurora Tank gold deposit and 30km northeast of the Challenger gold mine.
The company said the proximity to Aurora Tank "creates obvious economies of scope and scale that are patently attractive''.
On that project, the company said:
Marmota's Aurora Tank gold discovery features outstanding gold intersections including multiple bonanza gold grades close to surface, superb recoveries in metallurgical test work, with excellent potential for low-cost, low capex open pit heap leach gold production.
More exploration underway
The company said stage two drilling was already underway, and was progressing well and ahead of schedule.
The goal, the company said, was to try to delineate the size of the potential deposit.
As a result of the maiden program, Greenewood has grown to an approximately 900m-long zone of near continuous mineralisation that was only subjected to a brief period of exploration by the previous owners. This was interrupted for non-geological reasons in 2018 — leaving an abundance of possibilities for increasing the dimensions of the mineralisation.
Marmota shares traded as high as 11.5 cents on Thursday morning before settling back to be 40.9% higher at 10 cents.
The company was valued at $83.3 million at the close of trade on Wednesday.
