Marmota has extended reverse-circulation (RC) drilling of its bonanza Aurora Tank gold discovery in South Australia from 58 holes to about 89 holes to close up remaining open sections in a final push towards a maiden resource.

The company has outlined a primary focus to table a maiden close-to-surface, high-grade, open-pittable resource at Aurora Tank and move as quickly as possible towards finalising an open-pit mine design.

With average hole depths planned to probe Aurora Tank to about 84m, the extended program lifts the total planned drilling metreage to about 7500m – up from the previous 5200m – and will also allow the rig to add infill holes and revisit a handful of previous locations where initial drilling was too shallow.

When the drilling program was announced less than a month ago, Marmota had already embarked on extensive metallurgical testwork to establish the best possible pathway to optimising gold recovery from its favoured low-cost, open-pittable heap leach production pathway. Management now says the testwork is progressing well and is more than 85 per cent complete.

The Aurora Tank gold mineralisation was discovered more than two years ago when Marmota’s drilling snagged a string of high-grade gold results while it was following up a significant find from more than 80m depth, with a 1m intercept going as high as 36 grams per tonne gold from 120m downhole.

Follow-up results revealed 4m at 18g/t gold from 76m, 4m going 12g/t gold from 116m and 4m running 6g/t gold from 72m downhole, offering an enticing heads-up on Aurora’s most attractive feature – a preponderance of high-grade gold within 20m to 50m from surface.

Subsequent drilling has revealed Aurora Tank contains some sensational gold intercepts, with near-surface bonanza gold grades that have been shown to have more than 100g/t gold in 1m grabs. The almost ubiquitous high grades close to the surface became a cue for the company to start exploring the low-cost, low-capex gold production avenue via open-pit mining and gold recovery through heap leaching.

Marmota says it is also now expecting fire-assay gold results in about three weeks from the latest drilling at its Goolagong target, about 67km to the south-west of Aurora Tank.

Given the company’s success at Aurora Tank, no doubt management would welcome a similar reprise at Goolagong – particularly with the gold price still hovering near all-time highs and today sitting at about $3700 an ounce in Australia. That is more than double the price when Marmota started its work at the SA project just a few years ago.

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