Helix Resources Ltd (ASX:HLX) has leveraged wide-spaced auger geochemical sampling at the Eastern Group copper-gold tenements in the resource-rich Cobar-Nyngan area of central New South Wales to highlight two broad areas of anomalous gold up to 5 kilometres long.
The company says there are multiple occurrences of gold in auger present along these two zones, with maximum values up to 100 parts per billion in the soil samples.
These gold anomalies are also consistent with recent rock chip results, which generated assays up to 8.95 g/t gold at the Aldebaran and Max’s Folly prospects.
“Excellent” drilling prospects
“Helix continues to use a number of advanced exploration techniques to generate high-quality copper-gold targets and I am very excited to see some of these surveys illustrate coincident anomalies which present excellent prospects for drill testing,” Helix Resources executive technical director Kylie Prendergast said.
“Our latest batch of results have identified extensive gold anomalies which are accompanied by a large-scale antimony-arsenic anomaly.
“Arsenic and antimony are known pathfinders to copper-gold mineralisation in the Cobar district.
“The scale of the anomalies, which are still open in two directions, adds further copper-gold discovery potential within this newly identified zone, located only 60 kilometres south of Aeris Resources' Tritton copper operations.”
Recent sampling has extended the pathfinder antimony-arsenic anomaly to a zone of more than 11 kilometres by 4 kilometres, which remains open in the south and the west for further exploration.
The large-scale nature of the pathfinder footprint has led Helix to conclude the mineralisation may be part of a large hydrothermal system with gold and copper potential.
Low-cost, high-return exploration
“The ongoing low-cost, auger sampling programs are a lynchpin in our copper-gold discovery strategy and have been highly effective at rapidly delineating and ranking new targets,” Prendergast highlighted.
“For the next month, we are focused on new geophysical surveys to optimise precious drill metres leading us to defer the planned drill program to late April/May to ensure we hit the best targets.
“Helix has a robust pipeline of copper-gold targets which have the potential to deliver a major copper-gold discovery in the highly endowed, Cobar copper-gold region close to established operations and processing facilities.”
Helix is undertaking step-out induced polarisation (IP) geophysics at the Canbelego Project and expects early results to be available from late March.
The company plans to follow up those results with infill and extensional sampling on the new anomalies.
HLX will also reschedule a drilling campaign planned for March, waiting on results to refine the new and emerging targets at the Eastern Group tenements. Drilling will now begin in April or May.