Alien Metals provides Elizabeth Hill drilling update
Published by Jessica Casey,
Editor
Global Mining Review,
Alien Metals Ltd, a global minerals exploration and development company, has updated the market on its inaugural drilling programme at the high-grade Elizabeth Hill Silver Project in the Pilbara Region of Western Australia.
Highlights
- Ongoing drilling at Elizabeth Hill continues to produce visible sulfides.
- Visible sulfides and native silver have been observed in core and reverse circulation (RC) chips, which appears to support the company’s view that a larger polymetallic halo exists around the original high-grade silver deposit.
- Drilling to date has provided important quality control (QA/QC) validation of historic work and helped identify new mineralization.
- Excellent quality core attained, which has been logged, cut and despatched.
- Currently, around 753 m has been drilled as part of the ongoing drill programme at Elizabeth Hill, including:
- 211 m of diamond core drilling (four holes).
- 542 m of RC drilling (six holes).
- 14 RC holes for approximately 1100m remain, which will test targets along strike of the main orebody and at the nearby J-reef.
Bill Brodie Good, CEO and Technical Director of Alien Metals, commented: “We are very much looking forward to receiving the initial assay results from the diamond drilling. So far, the drilling programme has given us some excellent geological information and some very encouraging visual results including pure silver and copper and nickel sulfides. Importantly, the core has been logged, cut and samples despatched over the past week.
“The move to RC drilling will enable to cover more ground at a faster pace while keeping largely within the same budget. We anticipate this flexibility will help us define future diamond drilling programmes.”
Further to the announcement of 9 September 2021, the company advises that it has switched to a RC drilling rig at the Elizabeth Hill Silver project. The RC rig will complete the remaining planned diamond holes, four of the original eight, which as advised were targeted at the historic silver orebody to get a better understanding of the grade, orientation and potential for a mineralised polymetallic halo which the company believes exists around the original orebody. The RC programme will also test other targets along strike from the mine and the surrounding J-Reef target to the east and south of the orebody within the Elizabeth Hill mining licence.
The holes drilled with diamond core have provided excellent geological information from logging and hand held XRF (pXRF) testing. Visible silver was intersected in at least two holes; numerous sulfides were also identified in both veining and disseminated form throughout the rock units. The technical team has noted that there is an apparent polymetallic mineralised halo mainly in the eastern side of the Munni Munni fault in the ultramafic suite of rocks, while there appears to be strong silver mineralisation in the granite units to the west.
The inaugural diamond drilling programme was designed to test some of the historic drilling undertaken over 20 years ago on the main silver ore-body for quality control (QA/QC) purposes, but also importantly to test the company’s belief that the historical silver orebody forms part of a much larger and widespread mineralised system. The RC programme will both complete the planned holes and complement this program with fresh drilling targets being tested.
Logging and core-cutting has been completed on all the diamond core and 247 samples submitted to Bureau Veritas Laboratory in Perth for full suite analysis. It is anticipated that the initial results will be available in 6 – 8 weeks.
Prospect targeting has been based on a combination of work completed in-house by Alien following extensive reviews of historic data, along with geophysical studies undertaken by the company’s consultants. A total of ~1700 m over 20 holes are planned over these targets.
The technical team is constantly analysing each hole as its drilled and adjusting the programme to suit the findings so the final drilling might have slight variations to the planned one.
Read the article online at: https://www.globalminingreview.com/exploration-development/07102021/alien-metals-provides-elizabeth-hill-drilling-update/
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