Kairos Minerals makes ‘exceptional’ nugget discovery at Croydon gold project

A helicopter-supported exploration program has seen Kairos Minerals (ASX: KAI) recover 135 nuggets totalling 11.1 ounces of gold from two newly-discovered nugget “patches” at the Croydon project in Western Australia’s Pilbara region.

The company reported the discovery of the “exceptional” new conglomerate-derived gold nugget occurrences at Patch #2 and Patch #3 just two months after its maiden gold find at Croydon in a region targeting basal unconformity between the Mount Roe basalt and older Archaean basement rocks.

That find – labelled Patch #1 – totalled 256 nuggets for 8.2 ounces (approximately 254 grams) of gold and was located 2.5 kilometres north of this week’s discoveries, over an area of less than 150 metres x 50m.

Patch #2 has added another 126 nuggets for 10.8oz (approximately 300g) gold, and was made during follow-up of a recently-completed stream sediment sampling program, which returned 20 pieces of gold (“colours”) in the pan at a maximum grade of just 0.63 grams per tonne.

Patch #3, 2km north-west of Patch #1, contained nine nuggets for 0.3oz (approximately 8.5g) gold, found within sandstone and deflated conglomerate of the lower basal Fortescue Group Hardey formation.

Kairos said the third patch – explored to date using only metal detectors over an area of 40 metres x 20m – was made upstream of a sample which yielded only three colours of visible gold in the pan, and is “worthy of follow-up”.

The three patches host a total 391 nuggets with a combined weight of 19.3oz gold (or 600.3g) and range in weight from 0.1g to 19.5g.

Aesthetically, they display flattened “watermelon seed” shapes with pitted textures as well as rounded and irregular forms, and are believed to be analogous to the Purdy’s Reward and Comet Well discoveries held in joint venture by Artemis Resources (ASX: ARV) and Novo Resources.

Successful year

The helicopter-borne program – focused on contacts within the region of Kairos’ maiden nugget find, and additionally between Mount Roe and the basal Fortescue Group Hardey Formation – rounds off a successful year at the Croydon project, located approximately 100km to the west of the company’s Mt York gold-lithium project.

Stream sediment sampling programs have identified significant gold anomalism in several locations within the project area, and extended the gold anomalism to over 4km within the same stratigraphic corridor to the north-east and south-west of the first nugget patch discovery.

A new program of follow-up reconnaissance sampling and metal detecting is in progress to provide more refined geochemical and geological data over the area.

“The 2018 exploration field season has been a huge breakthrough for our ongoing work [at Croydon] and highlights the scale of this opportunity,” said executive chairman Terry Topping.

“We have commenced the approvals process for follow-up selected trenching and drilling to further evaluate the prospective conglomerate horizons, which we expect to commence at the start of the 2019 season.”

At midday, shares in Kairos Minerals were trading 8.33% higher at $0.026.