Tesoro Resources surveys reveal new gold targets, extend Ternera mineralised zone
Tesoro Resources has confirmed gold mineralisation at Ternera East extends over 600m of strike and remains open in all directions.
Chile-focused explorer Tesoro Resources (ASX: TSO) has announced results of geophysical surveying at its El Zorro gold project that extends known mineralised zones at the Ternera prospect and reveals new untested targets.
The company’s trial geophysics program comprised a gradient array induced polarisation (GAIP) survey grid and three lines of dipole-dipole IP (DDIP) survey completed over the Ternera and Drone Hill areas of the Chilean project.
According to Tesoro, IP anomaly extensions and new standalone anomalies provide significant new targets, extending Ternera’s strike by about 500m north and 250m south from existing drilling. This includes untested IP anomaly zones sitting below the Ternera gold mineralised corridor.
Tesoro managing director Zeff Reeves described the preliminary survey results as “certainly exciting”.
“We have already modelled the preliminary data in 3D as soon as it was received from the field, and compared it to our drilling, immediately noticing that some of our best drill results occur within a well-defined IP anomaly trend,” he said.
“The anomaly we have just delineated adds significant extensional targets to the high-grade Ternera gold zone,” Mr Reeves added.
Preliminary results
The IP survey data was acquired by Quantec Geoscience in Chile then processed and interpreted in Perth, Western Australia by Resource Potentials.
According to Tesoro, the preliminary results show “stand-out chargeability anomalies which indicate the presence of sulphide mineralisation (mainly pyrite), which is intimately associated with gold mineralisation in the project area”.
The preliminary results also correlate with existing drilling, especially one significant GAIP and DDIP anomaly zone that directly correlates with high-grade gold drilling results previously reported from Ternera that are associated with pervasive pyrite and silica alteration.
This anomaly strikes north to south for about 1,000m and only along about 250m of strike of this anomaly has been drill tested, Tesoro reported.
An additional strong GAIP anomaly was detected at Drone Hill, about 250m long and open to the northwest.
Expanded drilling program
Tesoro is now preparing for immediate step-out drilling of the newly identified IP anomalies at Ternera, as well as initial drill testing of the Drone Hill anomaly.
“Should those holes be successful, it will add a significant increase to the scale of the gold system, and we would view IP as a valuable exploration tool for defining additional drilling targets at El Zorro,” Mr Reeves said.
Final IP data processing, modelling, interpretation and targeting is also ongoing with the new drilling results expected to improve the outcomes of this study.
If the results from the step-out drilling are positive, the company said it will plan further IP surveying to delineate additional gold targets at El Zorro.
Today’s announcement follows encouraging channel and rock ship sampling results reported last week and news that Tesoro has expanded its El Zorro foothold by 360% after applying for 156 new prospect concessions.