Southern Cross adds fourth rig to drilling at Sunday Creek gold project
This latest rig will test the Tonstal-Western Consols trend about 7.5km northeast of the main drill area.
Southern Cross Gold (ASX: SXG) has added a fourth rubber track-mounted rig to drilling activities at its Sunday Creek epizonal gold project in Victoria.
Three rigs will continue to drill between the Golden Dyke and Apollo targets, while the new rig will complete a 2,500m program over the next three months at the regional Tonstal-Western Consols trend located 7.5km to the northeast.
Managing director Michael Hudson said the new rig would help address the project’s large footprint, which extends over 11km.
“We have targeted Tonstal first, as our analysis shows the same mineralisation style with a broad north-east dyke trend containing high-grade veins set over a 1.5km strike,” he said.
“If our drilling at Sunday Creek can demonstrate the same style of mineralisation with gold, this will be a step shift again for the project.”
Sunday Creek location
Sunday Creek is located 60km north of Melbourne within 193.65 square kilometres of granted exploration tenements.
It has a 11km mineralised trend extending beyond the drill area and is defined by historic workings and soil sampling which have yet to receive any drilling.
As is typical for epizonal deposits like Fosterville and Costerfield, locally-visible gold at Sunday Creek is hosted in quartz and carbonate veins, with a later intense stibnite-bearing vein and breccia overprint.
A larger arsenic anomaly is associated with the gold mineralisation and is mostly represented by arsenian-pyrite but develops to arsenopyrite-bearing zones with a clear spatial relationship to high-grade gold.
Mineralised shoots at Sunday Creek are formed at the intersection of shallow-dipping mineralised veins and a steep north-dipping structure hosting dioritic dykes and related intrusive breccias.
Antimony levels
Epizonal deposits in Victoria often have associated high levels of antimony and Sunday Creek is no exception.
Antimony features highly on the critical minerals lists of many countries including Australia, the US, Canada, Japan and the European Union.
China and Russia currently produce approximately 82% of the world’s raw material supply.
Australia ranks seventh in the world for antimony production despite all production coming from a single mine at Costerfield in Victoria, located nearby to Southern Cross’ projects.
Adequate supplies of antimony are critical to the world’s energy transition and to the high-tech industry, especially the semi-conductor and defence sectors.
It is a vital element in the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries and to the next generation of liquid metal batteries which will lead to scalable energy storage for wind and solar power.