Southern Gold closes the year out with busy work schedule at South Korea projects
South Korea-focused exploration company Southern Gold (ASX: SAU) has confirmed its in-country team is making progress on seven different project areas, managing a program of drilling, prospect mapping, geophysical surveying and soil sampling to close out the 2020 calendar year.
At the Dokcheon gold-silver project, the company’s current drilling program is targeting ‘greenfield’ epithermal vein systems which have never been drilled before.
The drill plan includes three holes for a designed 540 metres to test a 100m strike section (with 50m hole spacing) and is expected to be completed by mid-December.
At the historic Aphae gold project, a drone-based magnetic survey has commenced in lieu of available country-wide government magnetic data which has been deemed too coarse to be utilised.
Southern is using industry-standard survey gear owned by KIGAM (Korean Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources) and the data will be processed by Southern Geoscience Consultants.
It is believed to be the first time a company has flown an aeromagnetic survey with a resolution less than 1km line spacing, for mineral exploration applications in the country.
Exploration technique
Southern Gold’s Korean team has also completed multiple orientation soil sampling programs across mineralised structures at the Weolyu, Deokon, Daeam Valley, Dokcheon and Janghwal targets to calibrate an exploration technique for next year’s work plan.
Janghwal was been the subject of a recently-discovered mine adit, with peak assays of 8.04 grams per tonne and 4.66g/t gold returned from underground rock chip sampling to complement an earlier grab sample of 6.7g/t gold.
At Deokon, more rock chip sampling has been completed to the north of the Thorn zone where further outcropping veins have been located, extending the total known strike extent of the Golden Surprise structural corridor by 440m to 1.1 kilometres.
Southern will follow-up these results with extensional (reconnaissance) and infill traversing and associated rock sampling, structural measurements and observations.
On schedule
Managing director Simon Mitchell said ground activities in South Korea were progressing to schedule.
“There are a lot of “firsts” in this update and a high level of field activity across a lot of projects as we close out the calendar year,” he said.
“As [South Korea moves] into winter, we will [relocate] drilling and field activities to the coastal regions where the weather is more benign and look to restart in the mountain districts in early spring next year.”
He said this approach would maintain “exploration momentum” and ensure Southern Gold has a strong news flow to kickstart the new year.