Southern Cross adds third rig to drilling at Sunday Creek gold-antimony project
Southern Cross Gold has enough funding to cover tow years of drilling at Sunday Creek.
Southern Cross Gold (ASX: SXG) has reported a 50% increase in the number of drill rigs operating across multiple targets at the Sunday Creek gold-antimony project in Victoria.
The latest addition is a rubber track mounted unit, which has been specially designed to reduce noise and minimise its environmental impact.
Southern Cross now has three rigs operating across the Golden Dyke, Rising Sun and Apollo prospects along an 800m strike of known surface mineralisation, with the deepest drilling to date in progress.
One of the holes is designed to drill Rising Sun in a previously untested west-to-east orientation.
Demonstration of confidence
Managing director Michael Hudson said the addition of the third rig is a demonstration of Southern Cross’ confidence in the developing project.
“This will allow drill metres to be produced faster which will aid in our strategy to expand the gold-antimony mineralisation to depth and define further mineralised shoots, with results delivered more often,” he said.
Project location
The Sunday Creek epizonal-style gold project is located north of Melbourne within 193.65 square kilometres of granted exploration tenements along the Lachlan Fold Belt.
The project is considered to have potential to become a significant exploration discovery, with a 10km mineralised trend extending beyond the drill area and defined by historic workings and soil sampling which have yet to receive any exploration focus.
Mineralisation at Sunday Creek is controlled by veining, stibnite-gold-matrix breccias and brittle faults.
The immediate host is a zone of intensely altered white mica-pyritic siltstones and white mica-pyrite-carbonate altered dyke rocks.
Locally-visible gold 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 mineralisation, and mostly represented by arsenian-pyrite but developing to arsenopyrite-bearing zones with a clear spatial relationship to high-grade gold.
Southern Cross said the gold and antimony content included in the gold equivalent calculations for Sunday Creek have “reasonable potential” to be recovered, given current geochemical understanding, historic production statistics and geologically analogous mining operations.