Galane Gold Ltd. says it is conducting a major long term exploration programme over a large number of prospects contained within its mining leases and exploration tenements which cover the bulk of the Tati greenstone belt in Botswana.
The company has provided an update concerning on-going exploration work at its Tekwane Prospect to define gold mineralisation found in a flat-lying quartz rubble bed in the soil profile, close to surface. The company is also announcing results from the first phase of pit excavations at the Tekwane Prospect.
Through a regional program completed by a predecessor to the company in 2002, a gold-in-soil geochemical anomaly measuring 2.6km X 1.0km in size was shown to exist, which was named the Tekwane Prospect. The Tekwane Prospect is located approximately
11km down the main road from the Company’s processing plant at the Mupane Mine, north of the Archaean Tati greenstone belt in Botswana.
It is covered by Prospecting Licence 101/2011 held by the Company’s wholly-owned subsidiary Northern Lights Exploration Company (Pty) Limited.
The program of work commenced in March of 2012 and currently is designed as a “finding the limits” exercise and not a resource defining exercise. The method of exploration is to excavate pits by a mechanical backhoe.
“This is done on a systematic grid with pits every 50m along lines that are 100m apart. The average depth is 1.5m, exposing the full soil profile, which contains an auriferous quartz rubble horizon, and into the underlying bedrock. Pits are logged and the quartz rubble and bedrock exposures are sampled in detail. To date 250 pits have been dug and sampled in 3 phases, while a 4th phase of 176 pits is in progress,” says Galane Gold.
The company has received the results from the first phase of 72 pits. Overall our pitting work to date has shown that the auriferous quartz rubble horizon appears to be the cause of the geochemical anomaly. This has helped define the objectives of the exploration program, which are twofold: (i) to evaluate the quartz rubble horizon in the pits and to ascertain its continuity, and (ii) to try and determine the source of the quartz rubble. Pitting on a 100m X 50m grid will continue until the limits of the gold bearing quartz rubbles have been determined. Thereafter, infill pits will be excavated to give 50m X 50m coverage, which will be reduced selectively to 25m X 25m. The excavation of continuous trenches between some of the 25m pits are expected to complete the field requirements for a resource estimate that is compliant with National Instrument 43-101 – Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects (“NI 43-101”).
The 72 pits from which the sample results have been received cover an area measuring
800m X 500m and are highlighted in the map below. In this area there were 52 pits carrying quartz rubble with grades including values of; Pit ID TKPT029 43.47 g/t; Pit ID TKPT030 39.71 g/t; and Pit ID TKPT056 30.50 g/t Au.
Overall these 52 pits have yielded an average sampled width of 0.24m with grades shown in the tabulated summary of all pit results which is attached to this news release as Schedule “A”.
The detailed logging and sampling of the bedrock exposed in the pit bottoms is inconclusive at this stage.
All samples summarised in this news release were collected by personnel of the Company under the supervision of senior staff and a qualified person, as defined by NI 43-101. Each collected sample weighs roughly 4 kg and employees transported these samples to the independently run sample preparation facility operated by Genalysis Laboratory Services Pty Ltd.
The facility prepares samples for analysis (the samples are crushed and milled with 90% passing through 75 microns) and ships them to the Genalysis laboratory in Johannesburg, South Africa, where the gold is determined by a fire assay of a 50 gram sample.
The Genalysis laboratory is registered to ISO 9001:2001 and has received ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation. In addition to the internal QA-QC program used by this accredited laboratory, the Company also maintains an independent QA-QC program that includes the use of certified standard reference materials, blanks, as well as field duplicates. The quality control data associated with these results falls within acceptable ranges for all relevant parameters.
Galane Gold is an un-hedged gold producer and explorer with mining operations and exploration tenements in Botswana. It is a public company and its shares are quoted on the TSX Venture Exchange and the Botswana Stock Exchange under the symbol GG.
