Australian Gold and Copper Ltd (ASX:AGC) has made what it calls “major advances” at the Cargelligo and Rast tenements, along with the new Nyora exploration licences, now collectively referred to as the South Cobar Project in central NSW.
Regional exploration completed in late 2022 and early 2023 delineated extensive “prospective target horizons”, spanning 115 kilometres, cumulatively across the Cargelligo, Rast and Nyora exploration licences – now known collectively as the South Cobar Project.
Major gold and base metal targets
The southern Cobar Basin, where AGC is prospecting, is “a grossly underexplored” part of the basin with what the company considers to be the potential to host major gold and base metal deposit styles.
The prospective horizons are along strike from recent major discoveries and significant mines in the central and southwestern Cobar Basin, displaying many similar geological features and surface expressions.
This exploration progress comes as AGC uses regional geophysics, structural mapping and modelling to delineate targets – confirming it all with field-based ground truthing.
Each prospective target horizon is associated with reactivated regional scale basin-forming growth faults and volcanism analogous to the major mineral systems to the north.
Numerous areas of historical workings have been discovered in the area, such as the Creamy Hills Gold Mine, which was recently reported to have returned rock chips grading at up to 24.4 g/t gold.
“Our knowledge of the South Cobar Project has significantly advanced since IPO and recent discoveries in the central and southwestern Cobar basin continue to encourage us that the Basin is still very open,” managing director Glen Diemar said.
“Each new discovery is found on large-scale structures; they take a while to work out and understand but once they do they often provide numerous discoveries.
World’s greatest mines
“Intracratonic basins such as and including the Cobar Basin are responsible for some of the world’s greatest copper-gold-silver-zinc-lead mines and we have been working hard to package this 120-kilometre-long prospective belt together in such long, strike-extensive favourable rock packages adjacent to major growth faults, which has never been done before in this area.
“We are very encouraged by this next phase of growth. Pole-dipole induced polarisation surveys are very effective in defining drill targets as they aid to find zones of abundant mineralisation including copper sulphides.
"A great recent example is the discovery of the high-grade Federation deposit, were induced polarisation was the catalyst to the decision to drill in 2019.”
An induced polarisation geophysics survey is now underway, targeting potential mineralisation within the prospective target horizons at three separate prospects including Achilles, Hilltop and Planet.