Cooper Metals Ltd (ASX:CPM) has identified a 400-metre by 100-metre copper-gold prospect at the Mt Isa East Project in northwest Queensland, leveraging a versatile time domain (VTEM) survey and copper soil sampling grading up to 4,565 parts per million to define the new 'Grasswren' prospect.
The VTEM conductor at Grasswren is about 340 metres long, dipping at 72 degrees to the southwest. The top of the plate sits about 25 metres below surface and extends to about 400 metres in depth.
Cooper also sampled rock chips of up to 3.56% copper at the nearby Solo prospect and intends to conduct a government-funded, detailed gravity survey over target areas near the King Solomon, Brumby Ridge and Raven prospects later this month.
Grasswren “very promising”
“The new Grasswren copper-gold prospect with its coincident VTEM conductor and strong copper-in-soil anomaly is looking very promising,” Cooper managing director Ian Warland said.
“Grasswren is located on a significant fault splay coming off the regional Fountain Range Fault, that has been a significant feeder structure for copper-gold mineralisation in the area.
“Recent rock chip sampling has also provided new encouraging results for the Solo Copper-Gold Prospect, with new rock chips returning up to 3.56% copper and anomalous gold, confirming the strong prospectivity of the area.”
The Solo prospect sits on the sheared contact between the Corella Formation and the Overlander Granite, a copper-gold-prospective geological zone with high potential for mineralisation.
Pipeline of exploration targets
“Cooper’s strategy is continuing to build a pipeline of copper-gold targets for future drill testing at Mt Isa East, while assessing and acquiring new exploration opportunities to build shareholder wealth,” Warland concluded.
The government-funded survey is targeted at filling in sparse existing data over 150 square kilometres, which will offer a much higher level of detail to target copper-gold exploration in the area.
Cooper’s most promising prospects at present are the Attina, Grasswren and Solo targets, all within 20 kilometres of each other, which will be the focus of exploration in this southern zone of the Mt Isa East Project.
The survey will begin late this month, requiring a handful of weeks to complete.