REGION - Stawell based Navarre Minerals Limited has commenced drilling at its one hundred percent owned Eclipse copper-gold prospect, part of the Black Range project.
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Navarre has planned a 1000 metre air-core drilling campaign to test its concept of potential large tonnage porphyry-style copper-gold targets at Eclipse.
Drilling is expected to assist in characterising the hydrothermal alteration assemblages typically present in a porphyry system and to use this information to vector towards high grade mineralisation in future drill testing.
Navarre's compilation of previous exploration data has resulted in the development of a new geological concept for Eclipse based on similarities with the porphyry system at the giant Cadia copper-gold deposit in central New South Wales.
"Our initial 2010 diamond drill hit at the Eclipse prospect has intrigued us for the past three years. It is not every day you encounter a 276m intersection which ends in mineralisation," Navarre Managing Director, Mr Geoff McDermott said.
"We have completed a lot of work since then, including background research with experts out of the Centre of Excellence in Ore Deposits (CODES) in Tasmania and with the Geological Survey of Victoria (GSV).
"We also recognised that zinc is a common accessory mineral in the margins of porphyry copper-gold deposits.
"What has become apparent is that the geological information we have assembled at Eclipse supports a porphyry-style copper-gold model.
"A recent program of soil geochemistry completed over a large (2900m by 700m) demagnetized feature co-incident with a gravity low is providing further evidence to support our thesis that Eclipse may represent a large porphyry system," Mr McDermott said.
Navarre holds several exploration tenements as part of its Delamerian base metals and gold project in western Victoria, which includes the Black Range Project.
These tenements contain extensive under-explored volcanics with several known occurrences of base metals and gold mineralisation of which the Eclipse prospect is the most advanced.