VENTURE AFRICA – Stockport Exploration Inc. has announced plans to advance to auger-based drilling at its Kamwango Grid, centrally located within the company’s 2,000 km2 Kenyan property package, as the company says both surface gold-bearing deposits and an independent geophysical program point to the same target areas.
Stockport will begin an auger drill-based exploration program to measure the grade and tonnage of the surface pebble lag deposit, as well as mapping additional quartz pebble lag in other areas of the Kamwango Grid. Stockport will also be undertaking an additional 70 kilometres of gradient IP testing on the Kamwango Grid.
“There is no single road sign when you are looking for world-class gold deposits,” says Stockport President and CEO Jim Megann.
“What we are looking for are multiple vectors that all point in the same direction, and that is what we believe we are seeing here in Kamwango—multiple, independent evidence pointing to the fact that there is the potential for a significant gold discovery,” he said.
Stockport is focused on the exploration of a district-scale land package along a prolific gold-hosting greenstone belt in southwest Kenya. It controls a district-scale property position in a poorly-exposed and under-explored Archean greenstone belt that has demonstrated the potential to host large scale Au(-Ag) and Cu-Zn-Au-Ag deposits. Stockport’s project portfolio is reminiscent of the early days of exploration in other highly productive greenstone belts such as those found in South Africa, Canada, and Australia.
Meanwhile, results of Stockport’s recently completed induced polarization (IP) survey have been overlaid with mapping and sampling of a gold-bearing quartz vein pebble lag with reported individual samples grading up to 8.11 g/t gold. Both IP and pebble lag sampling have independently highlighted three potential targets that may host significant quartz vein systems.
The gradient IP program on the Kamwango Grid was comprised of 34 line kilometres laid out on north-south grid lines spaced at 100 metres. As a follow-up to the gradient data results, five kilometres of pole-dipole IP were completed.
Stockport Vice President of Exploration Matt Rees says, “The IP program identified three strong, east-west trending resistivity-high anomalies. The three zones are sub-parallel, and all appear to be located along or within a magnetically defined northeast-trending fault corridor.”
Quartz pebble lag deposits were mapped and systematically sampled prior to the IP survey. Combined with the new IP data, the results show a very strong correlation with three resistivity targets. The highest-grade lag samples (generally 6-8 g/t Au) occur directly over the resistivity highs, with gold grades in the lag decreasing away from the IP anomalies, suggesting the resistivity highs are the source of the highest-grade lag samples.
The three IP resistivity high targets that correlate to highly anomalous gold-bearing pebble lag all occur in an area of known artisanal workings. Several other similar resistivity high anomalies, over which pebble lag was not recovered, remain to be investigated.
