Barton Gold wraps up Tarcoola seismic targeting program
Barton Gold (ASX: BGD) has successfully wrapped up a regional seismic program at its historic Tarcoola gold project in South Australia.
Over 40km of geophones were laid out along 5 lines by seismic contractor HiSeis.
The program surveyed an approximate 13km long zone, where Barton is hunting for repeats of the Perseverance Mine’s mineralised structures and the proven high-grade gold at Tarcoola.
Specialist equipment brought into play
HiSeis utilised a suite of light and heavy-duty equipment to generate a signal captured by the geophones, with the new data to be analysed for the creation of a higher resolution image of immediate sub-surface structures across Barton’s priority target area.
“Tarcoola has a 130 year history of shallow high-grade gold production, with little historical work to identify the sources and controls of mineralisation,” said managing director Alex Scanlon.
“This program continues our R&D driven strategy to build a completely new regional geological model, identify the most prospective structures, and then systematically drill test them.”
“Our thanks to the HiSeis team for safe and quick execution of this program. We look forward to the results of analysis later this year so that we can expedite priority drilling during the last quarter of 2023 and into 2024.”
Funding support for new program
The company utilised funding of $4.73 million raised via an oversubscribed institutional placement and separate oversubscribed share purchase plan to support the new round of exploration activities at the historic Tarcoola site.
Tarcoola is located on approximately 1,640 sq km of tenements and is the site of the brownfields open pit Perseverance Mine which was operated during 2017 and 2018.
Previous high-resolution aeromagnetic surveys and a regional 2D seismic reinterpretation completed during 2020 identified a new regional interpreted 3D structural model and the new seismic work will follow-up that study for repeats of the deposit model.
The new survey data was acquired to help develop a higher resolution model of the near surface (0-500m depth) structure across the long zone associated with the Perseverance Mine’s mineralisation.
The company believes the area is historically under-explored with little modern drilling and still provides significant discovery potential.
Golden history to follow-up
The Tarcoola goldfield was South Australia’s major hard rock gold producer in the early 1900s producing approximately 77,000 ounces of gold bullion recovered from around 64,000 tonnes of ore at an average grade of around 37.5 grams per tonne of gold between 1900 and 1955.
Recent test drilling around the Perseverance mine during 2020 yielded positive results, further validating the existing ~500m long ‘Deliverance Target’, while discovering a new, shallow ~200m long gold zone immediately adjacent to Perseverance named Perseverance West.
Together with historical evidence, those drilling results and new information from the latest survey, Barton believes there is still significant upside at Tarcoola.
View video of Barton’s program here.