Marmota expands gold drilling in South Africa to find new resources

Marmota has expanded reverse circulation (RC) drilling at its stunning Aurora Tank gold discovery in South Australia from 58 to approximately 89 holes to close the remaining open areas and provide a final push toward a first gold resource.

The Company has focused primarily on developing an initial, high-grade, open-pit mine resource near surface at Aurora Tank and intends to complete the open pit mine design as soon as possible.

With average drill depths planned to explore Aurora Tank up to approximately 84 m, the expanded program increases the total planned drill distance to approximately 7,500 m – up from the previous 5,200 m – and will also allow the drill rig to add infill holes and revisit a handful of previous locations where the original drilling was too shallow.

When the drilling program was announced less than a month ago, Marmota had already begun extensive metallurgical testing to determine the best possible path to optimizing gold recovery from its preferred low-cost, open-pittable heap leach production path. Management now says testing is progressing well and is more than 85 percent complete.

The Aurora Tank gold mineralization was discovered over two years ago when Marmota produced a series of high-grade gold results during drilling when it made a significant discovery at over 80 meters depth. A 1-meter intercept at 120 meters depth yielded as much as 36 grams of gold per tonne.

Follow-up results showed a depth of 4 metres at 18 g/t gold from 76 metres, 4 metres at 12 g/t gold from 116 metres and 4 metres at 6 g/t gold from 72 metres. This provides an attractive indication of Aurora’s most attractive feature: an abundance of high-grade gold within 20 to 50 metres of surface.

Subsequent drilling has revealed that Aurora Tank contains some sensational gold intercepts, with near-surface gold grades demonstrated to contain over 100 g/t gold in 1m grabs. The near ubiquitous high near-surface grades provided a signal for the Company to explore the low-cost, low-capex gold production route via open pit mining and gold recovery by heap leaching.

Marmota says it now also expects gold test results in about three weeks from the latest drilling at the Goolagong target, approximately 67km southwest of Aurora Tank.

Given the company’s success at Aurora Tank, management would undoubtedly welcome a similar revival at Goolagong – especially as the gold price is still hovering around all-time highs, now around $3,700 an ounce in Australia. That’s more than double the price when Marmota began work on the SA project a few years ago.

Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: [email protected]