Manas Resources Limited (ASX: MSR) has significantly expanded its exploration portfolio in Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa through the application for two permits in the central north of the country.
Known as the Tortiya Gold Project (TGP), the early-stage project consists of two contiguous permit applications: the northern permit application, “Kadioha”, covers 399.4 sq. kmand the southern application, “Farakoro”, covers 381.3 sq. km.
The two permit applications comprising cover a large (>40km strike length) magnetic anomaly defining a crustal-scale sinusoidal shear zone cutting Birimian Supergroup country rocks. The area includes mapped greenstone belts west of the town of Tortiya.
Magnetic interpretation indicates that the greenstone belt rocks are more extensive than previously mapped. Throughout the Birimian of West Africa, major shear zones are conduits for hydrothermal fluid focus in the shears and surrounding rocks and are often associated with major gold deposits – e.g. the granitoid-hosted Ahafo mine in neighbouring Ghana (~13Moz Au) operated by Newmont Mining.
There is no record of historical gold exploration in the TGP area but outcrop is rare and the shear zone is a postulated source of known alluvial gold occurrences to the NE and SE.
Manas Chairman, Alan Campbell, said that once granted the new permits will be covered with regional soil geochemical sampling to identify targets for possible follow up by geophysical surveys and drilling.
We are very pleased to have increased the size of our ground holdings in Côte d’Ivoire,” Mr Campbell said.
“The company is ideally placed to take advantage of any exploration success as our activities progress through 2020 given our strong cash position.”
Manas has either staked for itself or entered into earn-in arrangements over a total area of over 1,811 km2covering highly prospective Birimian greenstones in the central-east and northern Côte d’Ivoire.