Matsa Resources Limited (ASX: MAT) continues to receive excellent gold results from new drilling at Fortitude North, Lake Carey, Western Australia.
The drilling has now extended the Fortitude North mineralized zone by almost 200m to the north resulting in a strike extent of 1.7km which remains open in both directions along strike. In addition, the drilling has extended mineralization across strike to the east by 60m for a new total width of some 250m. It is also clear that the Fortitude North mineralization remains open at depth.
To date the grades, widths and strike length identified shows that Fortitude North is a significant mineralized system that has the potential to be mined by either open pit or underground methods.
The mineralization has been defined over a strike length of 1.7km with drilling designed and planned to test the system over a strike length of two km.
The mineralization is shear zone hosted and associated with laminated quartz veining, albite alteration and pyrite. Similar geological setting and mineralizing style has been observed at Matsa’s Fortitude Gold Mine some 6km south, where trial open pit mining has taken place.
Coupled with this drilling, Matsa engaged experienced and highly regarded consultant Economic Geologist, Nigel Maund, to conduct a review of the drilling, logging of diamond core and RC drill chips and provide an initial appraisal of the significance of the recent drilling results, mineralization style and geological characteristics of Fortitude North.
“Fortitude North shares a number of important geological similarities to the world class 12Moz Sunrise Dam deposit” is one of Nigel Maund’s key conclusions arising out of this work and highlights geological features which strongly support the potential for Fortitude North to be a major gold deposit. Fortitude North, which is located 23km to the SSE of Sunrise Dam, is within the same structural corridor of a large fault step-over structure (or dilational jog) which in itself is within a larger regional scale dilational structure that is also host to the +8 Moz Wallaby deposit.
At the Fortitude Gold Mine further to the south, a resource of 489,000oz has been defined and Matsa believes the geology, thickness, grade and morphology of the mineralization at Fortitude North is likely to prove stronger than that of the Fortitude Gold Mine.
“This Fortitude North story just keeps getting better and better,” Executive Chairman, Paul Poli, said.
“The work done on this deposit over the past few months has been amazing. On one section alone, the results have demonstrated that the volume of mineralization has increased more than 4-fold from where we were last year. On that basis alone, we expect good things to continue to come out.
“Our recent drilling results have returned thicker packages of mineralization than we’ve seen before. What is really pleasing is that the mineralized zone has been extended and remains open along strike, and importantly, across strike to the east as well. Downdip has also not been tested to its full extent.
“The mineralized zone remains open in all directions and Nigel Maund’s work provides vast potential to the upside. We have a multi episodic, large scale hydrothermal mineralized system with late stage higher grade overprinting gold event that is capable of hosting in excess of a million ounce deposit
“We could be looking at a very significant discovery here.
“Earlier in the year, we promised to deliver a maiden resource at Fortitude North that would take Matsa’s total Lake Carey Gold Project resource base to over one million ounces before mid-year. Whilst this new drilling is sufficient to formalize a model over a small portion of the deposit, we’ve chosen not to embark on completion of a technical JORC compliant model at this stage.
“Why? Because we only need 114koz to get us over the 1Moz resource mark and we firmly believe we’d be selling Fortitude North short, when the prize appears to be so much bigger.
Once again, I’ll say that in 2023 Matsa is determined to deliver strong exploration results in both precious and green metals, and I am confident this will be a real turning point not only for Lake Carey, but the company as well.”
For further information please visit: https://www.matsa.com.au/
