S2 Resources Ltd’s (ASX: S2R) wholly owned subsidiary, Southern Star Exploration Pty Ltd has commenced a 5,600 metre, 10 hole initial diamond drilling programme at its 100% owned Greater Fosterville project in Victoria. This programme is expected to take approximately three months to complete.
The initial program will test a favourable gold corridor immediately north of Agnico Eagle’s Fosterville mine lease in the Goornong area, where previous exploration identified a strongly mineralised corridor centred on the Goornong South prospect and drilling during the 1990’s intersected significant oxide gold mineralisation.
During the last year that the exploration licence was held by Kirkland Lake (now Agnico Eagle) several diamond holes were drilled to the south along strike and down plunge of the historic oxide mineralisation. S2 has relogged these holes to construct the stratigraphic and structural architecture of what is now interpreted to be the next parallel prospective structure to the east of the O’Dwyers and Fosterville trends, which host the orebodies being mined by Agnico Eagle.
This first drill program will test immediately beneath and down plunge to the south of the Goornong South oxide mineralisation, testing multiple structures where they cross the main anticline that is interpreted to be the focus for mineralised fluids. Along the favourable anticline corridor any mineralised structure could refract and flatten into a favourable orientation with the potential to form high-grade trap sites for Swan zone-style gold mineralisation (the Swan Zone, located along the Fosterville trend within Agnico Eagle’s mine lease, had an initial Mineral Ore Reserve of 2.34Moz of gold at a grade of 49.6g/t).
S2 will employ a combination of conventional across strike holes in the shallower part of the system and unconventional strike parallel holes down the axial plane of the target anticline corridor to test for multiple stacked structural positions that cross the anticline. These axial plane holes are designed to test positions down plunge to the south of the oxide gold mineralisation as well as numerous other mineralised structures intersected by the historic diamond drilling completed by Kirkland Lake, any one of which could yield a significant discovery where they refract, flatten and dilate across the fold corridor.
The drilling programme will comprise a single rig operating primarily on a double-shift basis. It is expected that this first program will extend into February 2024, with the flexibility to modify later holes based on the knowledge gained from earlier drilling. Detailed structural and stratigraphic logging will be undertaken at the Company’s Bendigo field base with initial assay results expected around mid-December.
