Sunstone Metals Ltd (ASX:STM) had demonstrated strong progress in the expansion of its Limon gold-silver discovery within the Bramaderos Project in Ecuador, revealing new mineralised structures up to one kilometre from the Central Shoot and setting the stage for an upcoming exploration target assessment.
The new findings are based on drill holes LMDD041, 042, and 043, which highlighted gold and silver assays that identify additional mineralised structures for follow-up drilling.
The updated results form the last set of data required for assessing an exploration target at Limon, scheduled for release this November.
In addition, surface rock chip sampling has returned an assay of 5.05g/t gold and 5.36 g/t silver.
These results reinforce the ongoing definition of a large gold-silver epithermal system at Limon.
"Large gold-silver mineralised system”
Sunstone managing director Malcolm Norris said the latest results strengthen the Company’s view that Limon is a large gold-silver mineralised system with strong potential to host a significant open pit operation.
“We now know that where we intersect gold or silver at anomalous levels in drilling we have a live structure for follow up.
“Encouragingly, these results open up more new areas for drilling and enlarge our target zone,” Norris said.
“We are ‘stepping out’ to test the other peripheral gold-in-soil anomalies which are arrayed on all sides of the central Limon porphyry system.
“To be sampling 5g/t gold-bearing rocks at surface, 1km to the west is very exciting. These results will help underpin the Limon Exploration Target (NYSE:TGT) planned for November.
“We believe this will demonstrate the potential for a substantial mineral resource at Limon that can support an open pit development, which will in turn pave the way for a very large gold-copper-silver development across the wider Bramaderos project which houses the Limon, Brama, Alba, Melonal and potentially other mineralised porphyry systems”.
Limon gold in soils map showing extensive anomalous gold over an area of 1.7km x 700m.
Drill highlights
LMDD041 was drilled into the SE margin of the gold-in-soil anomaly and intersected two shallow mineralised structures of greater than 1g/t.
These combined with the intersections in parallel hole LMDD039 open up this area to further drilling.
The broad anomalous zone at the top of LMDD041 also intersected 40 metres of 32.6ppm molybdenum from 22 metres, and highly anomalous zinc from 22 to 46 metres.
LMDD042 was drilled in the northwest in a new gold-in-soil anomaly.
It intersected a 17-metre-wide interval of anomalous gold and silver, and other discrete intervals of anomalous zinc and tellurium, suggesting multiple mineralised structures for further follow-up.
LMDD043 was drilled on the south side of the Central Shoot and intersected multiple mineralised structures.
These intersections enable us to improve our structural model and plan follow-up drilling.
A noticeable feature of these intersections was, in most cases, a significantly higher silver-gold ratio, suggesting we should expect to see higher gold elsewhere on these structures.
Limon epithermal gold-silver system in plan view
About Limon discovery
The Limon target area is located 2.7 kilometres northeast of the Brama-Alba-Melonal gold-copper deposits.
The Bramaderos project straddles the Pan-American highway, and is close to available hydroelectric power, supporting the economics of potential development opportunities.
The project currently hosts a porphyry gold-copper-silver mineral resource estimate (MRE) of 2.7 million ounces of gold equivalent at Brama-Alba and an exploration target of between 3.3 million ounces and 8.6 million ounces of gold equivalent within 255 to 360 million tonnes at a grade between 0.40 and 0.74 g/t gold equivalent.