Southern Cross Gold Consolidated Ltd (ASX: SX2) has extended the gold strike at its Sunday Creek gold and antimony project in Victoria to 460m below its last best exploration results.
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Encouraging gold results
The company said in a statement to the ASX on Thursday that new exploration drilling had intersected mineralisation at a depth of about 1236m, with gold mineralisation present, including an intersection of 0.9m at 5.4 grams per tonne gold equivalent.
The company added:
The hole extended approximately 460 m below the defined exploration target at Golden Dyke, materially expanding the potential depth extent of the deposit and confirming scale comparable to mineralization depths discovered at the Rising Sun prospect.
Southern Cross Chief Executive Officer Michael Hudson said the results were significant.
He added:
This is a milestone hole for Sunday Creek. SDDSC194W1 was designed to answer a simple but critical question: does the system persist at depth well beyond our current exploration target? The answer is yes. In a bold step-out to untested depths, at 1,236 m below surface and 460 vertical metres below the last known mineralisation at Golden Dyke, we intersected 66 m of dyke and altered sediment with gold present. This is the deepest hole on the property to date. The thesis was to test whether the host sequence continued at depth – that thesis has been emphatically proven, and that we hit gold across a 28 m true thickness zone was an absolute bonus.
Mr Hudson said the geochemistry of the mineralisation was also encouraging.
The arsenic-to-antimony ratios we're seeing at depth are exactly what the epizonal model predicts, the fluid chemistry signature is right, and it tells us we are still within the productive part of the plumbing system. We are well below the antimony zone and into the sulphosalt area within the brittle-ductile transition – exactly where we expect to find robust, deep gold systems in the Victorian orogenic gold province. That's a powerful vectoring tool as we plan the next series of holes into this area.
More potential even deeper
Mr Hudson said adjacent deposits in Victoria were being tested at depths of more than 2km, and he was confident Sunday Creek could continue to more than 2km below the surface.
He added:
In this style of mineralisation, the veins form the rungs of a ladder, and drilling sub-parallel to those rungs can easily miss them entirely. The fact that we intersected a 28 m true thickness altered and veined zone with anomalous gold throughout confirms that the host sequence is thick, repeatable, and fertile at these depths. An exciting result.
Southern Cross Gold shares were 0.8% lower in early trade at $9.69. The company was valued at $2.53 billion at Wednesday's close.
