Sunstone Metals expands Limon prospect in Ecuador with promising gold and silver results
Sunstone Metals (ASX: STM) continues to highlight the potential of its Limon gold and silver discovery at the Bramaderos project in southern Ecuador.
Sunstone is undertaking an aggressive follow-up campaign at the Limon epithermal discovery backed by the roughly $5 million in new funding it raised in a share placement last week.
That work is already expanding the size of the discovery, with Sunstone obtaining “outstanding” high-grade gold exploration results around 1km away from the Limon Central Shoot site.
Major discovery
Managing director Malcolm Norris said the latest results showed Limon was set to move to a new level as a major discovery with the results indicating it could be a very large gold-silver system by global standards with shallow, high-grade mineralisation.
“Limon is now a very large gold system,” Mr. Norris said.
“The team is doing an outstanding job of defining targets, with focused follow-up in the field and delivering discoveries. Such positive results early in an exploration program give you confidence that this will be a large system with widespread gold and silver from surface.”
“We know from the Central Shoot drilling results that we have considerable vertical extent, so planned drilling here on this new western gold anomaly has the possibility of delivering rapid growth in contained ounces.”
“We are confident of significantly increasing our recently-released exploration target,” he added.
Maiden exploration target
In early November, Sunstone unveiled an initial Limon exploration target of between approximately 30 and 44 million tonnes at a grade of between 0.9 and 1.2 grams per tonne gold equivalent (AuEq), for between 0.9 and 1.7 million ounces AuEq.
The exploration target extends from surface to depths of up to 400m and is in addition to the December 2022 resource estimate of 2.7Moz AuEq for Brama-Alba gold-copper-silver porphyry mineralisation.
That’s on top of a December 2022 porphyry gold-copper-silver exploration target of 3.3 to 8.6Moz AuEq from the Brama-Alba and Melonal prospects and a small porphyry at Limon.
Widespread mineralisation
Mr Norris said it is now clear that there is epithermal gold-silver mineralisation in many areas within the 1.7km x 700m Limon alteration zone.
Follow-up trenches have been planned in this western part of Limon as a priority for early 2024.
The six most significant centres of porphyry gold-copper mineralisation on the Bramaderos property extend from Porotillo in the south through Melonal, Brama, Alba, Playas and to Limon in the north.
Sunstone’s main focus is the search for higher-grade epithermal mineralisation around the margins of the Limon, Brama and Porotillo porphyry systems.
The Brama and Alba porphyry systems have received the most drilling to date.