Gold Mountain unearths bonanza grade gold nuggets at Crown Ridge
Gold Mountain’s Crown Ridge gold project in Papua New Guinea.
Junior gold explorer Gold Mountain (ASX: GMN) has discovered “bonanza-grade type gold” nuggets at its Crown Ridge project in Papua New Guinea (PNG).
Its total project area in the country spans around 2,010 square kilometres, spread across the highlands of PNG.
Gold Mountain claims that the type of mineralisation it has encountered (epithermal quartz gold-silver) is often characterised by the presence of bonanza gold grades “possibly to the hundreds of grams per tonne,” such as from existing deposits at Porgera Zone VII and Edie Creek, two known multimillion-ounce deposits that were defined in recent years.
The explorer is confident of discovering significant alluvial deposits in the coming months as its exploration efforts continue and points to past occurrences of gold in excess of 1kg per tonne, as first evidenced by researchers Saunders and Schoenly in 1995.
Following the strong geophysical results today, Gold Mountain shares skyrocketed by over 40%, on the back of expectations that Gold Mountain will be able to define a JORC-compliant high-grade gold/silver mineral resource estimate later this year.
Ideally, Gold Mountain is seeking to establish a bulk gold mining operation and says it is now “fully funded for the current drilling and bulk sampling program, with the aim of defining a maiden Mineral Resource Estimate under JORC 2012 guidelines and additional exploration as required”.
Following the discovery of high-grade alluvial gold nuggets, Gold Mountain also says that it has “drill ready targets” already in view given the geophysical data and similarities with other known deposits.
According to Gold Mountain, several diagnostic characteristics — such as Quartz veins with open-spaced filling textures comprising centrally terminated quartz, dark iron-rich high temperature sphalerite, lesser galena and the iron sulphides, pyrite, chalcopyrite and pyrrhotite — indicate that its Crown Ridge prospect could deliver a significant resource for the explorer in the months to come.
In a regulatory filing, Gold Mountain said that, “economic indicators confirm multiple episodes of vein deposition and brecciation,” and that, “precious metal mineralization is continually being upgraded with each gold-bearing fluid pulse.”