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TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Africa-focused project-development firm Ivanhoe Mines on Wednesday revealed that it had uncovered new thick high-grade mineralisation in an area that had become a new extension of the Flatreef platinum/palladium/nickel/copper/gold/rhodium discovery at the company’s Platreef project, on the northern limb of South Africa’s Bushveld Igneous Complex.
The TSX-listed firm reported that drill hole UMT400, recently bored in the Ga-Madiba extension zone on the eastern flank of the Flatreef extension, intersected 48.6 m that contained 4.63 g/t of platinum, palladium and gold (3PE), and 0.30% nickel and 0.13% copper, at a cutoff of 1 g/t of 3PE.
The ratio of platinum to palladium was found to be about 1:1 in the mineralised intercept, while rhodium assays were still pending. The vertical intersection had a true thickness of about 34.4 m when adjusted for the dip of the mineralised zone.
The Ga-Madiba zone, covering about 3.7 km2, adjoins and stretches to the south from the established area of Canadian National Instrument 43-101-compliant inferred resources, which, in turn, surrounds the area of indicated resources that lay at the heart of the Flatreef discovery, and where Ivanhoe is planning to develop an underground mine.
“The drill results are another highly encouraging development in the history of our discoveries at Platreef, confirming our continuing exploration priority and demonstrating additional promising potential. Significantly, the drilling has established continuity of our open-ended, Flatreef polymetallic discovery, extending its strike length to 6.5 km,” said the founder and largest shareholder of Ivanhoe Mines, chairperson Robert Friedland.
He added that the combined grade and thickness of the platinum-group and base-metals mineralisation found in UMT400 further reinforced Ivanhoe’s belief that the Flatreef deposit remained open along strike for potential expansion.
“We plan to aggressively drill the area in pursuit of our objective of infilling and expanding this new discovery area,” Friedland noted.
Another new drill hole in the Ga-Madiba zone – UMT409, which collared 818 m south of UMT400 – also intersected substantial mineralisation on a portion of the Flatreef.
Holes UMT400 and UMT409 were collared about 3.5 km and 4.3 km, respectively, south of the site of the planned bulk-sample shaft on the Flatreef.
The high-grade mineralisation in the T2 reef started at a depth of 967 m below the surface and continued to 1 016 m in UMT400. The mineralised reef in UMT409 was intersected at much shallower depths of 720 m to 729 m below the surface.
A total of 15 parent drill holes had been completed on about 400-metre drill centres within the Ga-Madiba area. Ivanhoe said that it intended to prepare a maiden inferred resource estimate for the Ga-Madiba area after completing ten more holes from the planned exploration programme.
Drilling to date had successfully identified the T1 and T2 mineralised reefs and had confirmed the initial interpretation that the Ga-Madiba target represents the southern strike extension to the shallow-lying Flatreef.
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