Strata Minerals uncovers high-grade gold and silver at Biranup’s Black Dragon target
Strata Minerals (ASX: SMX) has returned high-grade rock chip results of up to 218 grams per tonne gold and 302g/t silver in initial field work at the Black Dragon target within its Biranup project in Western Australia.
The company collected 61 samples in outcrop activities over an area measuring 200 square metres that delivered results validating the work of previous explorers, with highlights of 218g/t gold and 206g/t silver, 206g/t gold and 302g/t silver and 170g/t gold and 54g/t silver.
Structural mapping and confirmatory sampling provided Strata with key understandings of the controls on the historic results and the company will integrate these results into the latest assays to plan and optimise its next phase of exploration at Biranup.
Strong results
Strata managing director Peter Woods said the underexplored project had produced strong results for the company.
“Biranup is a very exciting project, next door and along trend from AngloGold Ashanti’s major Tropicana gold mine, which is currently Australia’s second-largest gold producer,” he said.
“Our recent review and assessment work highlighted the underexplored opportunity at Biranup and we are now even more encouraged that we are looking at a large and potentially high-grade gold system with minimal prior effective exploration.”
Priority target
The priority Black Dragon target lies within a 4.5 kilometre structural gold trend, which is largely concealed by shallow transported cover.
Its mineralisation occurs within quartz veins, hematite breccia, iron-rich sheared basement schist and gneiss, and sericite-altered granite with disseminated pyrite.
The company believes the target – which has only been subject to wide-spaced aircore drilling, signalling vast untapped exploration potential – is the only area amongst the widespread transported cover with reasonable outcrop.
Marked by historically highly-anomalous rock chips, soil samples and drill results, Black Dragon was most recently assessed by previous owners for its nickel-copper-platinum group elements potential.