Antipa Minerals’ farm-in projects with IGO and Newcrest Mining are bearing fruit after the company announced a series of early-stage exploration findings.
A 2021 exploration program at the Paterson project in Western Australia, which is being fully funded by IGO as part of a $30 million farm-in, delivered seven high-priority copper, gold and pathfinder anomalies, three of which were air core (AC) anomalies and four soil anomalies.
Involving 168 drill holes for 11,346m and spanning an area of 350km2, the AC program identified the newly named Ricochet target, where drill hole 21PTA0221 hit 21m at 0.13 grams per tonne (g/t) gold and 2.6 g/t silver from 55m.
The encouraging results pave the way for a 2022 exploration program involving further AC drilling and diamond drilling, including diamond drill testing of two targets considered look-alikes to Newcrest’s Havieron gold joint venture project in WA.
With the support of IGO, Antipa will also complete airborne and ground geophysical surveys, and further soil sampling at Paterson.
“The Paterson farm-in project’s exciting new soil and air core targets are located within the highly prospective El Paso structural corridor, which extends from Havieron in the southeast, past Winu in the northwest,” Antipa managing director Roger Mason said.
“Several of these new targets are adjacent to the northern border of our 100 per cent-owned Minyari Dome project. Our tenure has just enough shallow cover to conceal, but also detect (via geophysics and soil sampling), potential world-class gold-copper deposits.”
Mason said the goal of the Paterson project was to discover any diamonds in the rough.
“The project-scale, systematic exploration approach by the Paterson farm-in project partners is designed to target any potential giants lurking under this shallow cover,” he said.
“Last year’s exploration results, whilst early stage, provided great encouragement, defining a number of early stage but high priority exploration targets that have the potential to deliver a major greenfield discovery.
“The 2022 exploration programme is considered pivotal in our quest for another major greenfield discovery.”
With Newcrest committing to the next stage of its $60 million Wilki farm-in agreement last week, 2022 exploration efforts will involve AC and diamond drilling, soil sampling and an aeromagnetic survey.
In particular, diamond core drilling will take place to scope Tetris, a Havieron look-alike target located 40km northeast of Antipa’s Minyari Dome project.
This comes after 43 holes were drilled for 7422m as part of a 2021 Wilki exploration program at Wilki.