Mining

Resource Base starts aircore drilling at Black Range high-priority VHMS targets

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By Imelda Cotton - 
Resource Base IPO ASX RBX

Resource Base is launching a $5.5 million IPO to explore the historic Victorian copper-gold project.

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Resource Base (ASX: RBX) has commenced aircore drilling at high-priority targets within its Black Range volcanic-hosted massive sulphide (VHMS) project in south-western Victoria’s prospective Stavely Volcanics corridor.

The program is a continuation of a 3,000m campaign, which kicked-off in February. Aircore drilling will enable the company to undertake lower-cost drilling to allow for efficient targeting of more expensive diamond programs which will follow in due course.

Resource Base plans to drill the remaining 1,500m in the southeast portion of the tenement and systematically test geophysical and regional targets.

The regional targets were defined from reconnaissance drilling and airborne geophysical data from the 1980s.

Ongoing exploration is expected to determine if VHMS-porphyry systems exist elsewhere on the Black Range tenement in similar scale to the company’s advanced Eclipse deposit.

Aircore work is expected to be completed by mid-April, after which the rig will move over to the Mitre Hill rare earth elements project for infill drilling of a previous broad-spaced program.

Nebula prospectivity

Earlier this month, results from shallow aircore drilling at Black Range confirmed the prospectivity of the project’s Nebula prospect.

The prospect returned anomalously high trace levels of a suite of indicator elements including silver, arsenic, barium, thallium, tellurium and copper.

They are commonly associated with VHMS or epithermal-style mineralisation and show similarities to the association present at Eclipse, located 700m to the west.

The results strengthen the interpretation of Nebula as a potential VMS horizon which was inferred during drilling from geological information that indicated a gradual change in volcanic rock composition adjacent to an abrupt change to a black shale horizon.

Ongoing aircore work at Nebula will track the horizon along strike and at depth in an attempt to vector toward copper-gold sites within the underlying volcanic footwall zone.

Stavely Arc location

Resource Base’s Black Range project includes multiple largely-untested targets over approximately 100km of the Stavely Arc volcanics.

The volcanics are mostly concealed by more recent cover rocks while small windows of basement exposure have led to the discovery of a number of copper-gold prospects including Eclipse, Lexington and Pollockdale.