Pioneer Minerals (ASX:PMM) now has a whole suite of “strong” exploration targets for its upcoming maiden drilling campaign at the Springfield tungsten-gold-gallium project in Idaho, after successfully wrapping up an airborne Versatile Time Domain Electromagnetic (VTEM) survey on-site this month.
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The Geotech-led VTEM survey achieved 100% completion of its planned design, spanning a total of 87 line kilometres flown at 100-metre line spacing.
The survey was specifically set up to identify conductive sulphide zones associated with a previously defined 2.9-kilometre magnetic anomaly. This large anomaly has been interpreted as a large-scale tungsten system.
Pioneer’s management has certainly come away happy, with chief Michael Beven dubbing the survey “one of the most important technical datasets to date.”
“Previous work established a strong relationship between scheelite and pyrrhotite mineralisation, making conductive sulphide anomalies identified by the survey high-priority drill targets,” he explained today.
Interpretations of the VTEM data will now be run by Mitre Geophysics, integrating the new EM dataset with Pioneer’s existing geological, magnetic and geochemical datasets. “We look forward to updating shareholders with the interpreted results as soon as they become available,” Mr Beven added.
Because pyrrhotite displays both magnetic and electrically conductive properties, Pioneer is now considering coincident magnetic and conductive anomalies to be the “priority exploration targets” for tungsten mineralisation.
Past high-grade surface sampling at the Springfield site returned results reaching up to 2.98% tungsten, 7.75 g/t gold, and 128.7 ppm gallium oxide.
Elsewhere, Pioneer has also physically staked 212 lode claims at North Pine. Under the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s first-come, first-served framework, these new claims are still subject to any final confirmation.
PMM opened at 13.5cps this morning.
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