Chesterfield Resources LSE:CHF has released further assay results from its 2021 diamond drilling at its Troodos West project in Cyprus. Not only has the drilling significantly enhanced the prospectivity at three target areas, Orchard, Evlim and Evlim South, but it has also established a 12km geological trend that is now considered key to controlling several mineralised systems, with the potential for further discoveries along the structure.
The company said today that the so-called “Westline Trend” will now be the focus its 2022 exploration campaign that is to commence very shortly.
Who are Chesterfield Resources?
Chesterfield Resources is a copper focussed exploration company centred around a newly-acquired large exploration project in Labrador Canada, together with its existing project in Cyprus. The exploration technical team is led by two highly experienced industry geologists Neil O’Brien, formally SVP Exploration & New Business Development, Lundin Mining, and Dave Cliff, previously Head of Exploration Europe, Rio Tinto.
The company has also acquired a major backer. In December 2020, Polymetal International, the FTSE100 mining group, which made a 23% investment in Chesterfield via a placing of new shares, as strategic backing for the company’s project in Cyprus.
“We now have final assays and an excellent suite of results from our 2,078m diamond drill programme of late 2021,” explained Executive Chairman Martin French. “In December we announced a highly encouraging strike on a gold/silver system at target area called Westline. Now we have strong sets of results from three additional targets, with a polymetallic zone at target Orchard, while further extensions of gold systems were successfully drilled at Evlim and Evlim South.”
French said that what is particularly exciting is that there is now strong evidence that these strikes are all on the same mineralised trend that extends down to the Westline system discovery, some 10km further south. The trend is some 12km long overall and links Chesterfield’s five most prospective target areas.
“Our operations team will be arriving back in Cyprus in two week’s time and there will now be a major exploration focus along the Westline Trend to identify more targets further linking the five identified by the 2021 campaign,” French added.
The Westline Trend also comprises strong intercepts drilled in 2018 at target area Evloimeni. Gold equivalent grades range from 1.63g/t to 8.04g/t, while when expressed in copper equivalent grade, these range from 1.00% to 4.94%.”
Other gold miners seeing some initial success in Cyprus
It is noteworthy that the two other main explorers on the island, Caerus Resources and Venus Minerals have also had surprisingly gold-rich encounters. On the Westline Trend, it is quite possible that the gold zones are indicating that there are proximal copper rich deposits nearby.
Copper rich zones in Cyprus VMS systems tend to be smaller and more highly concentrated, while the gold zones have a much broader footprint, and so are encountered more readily. The zone discovered at Orchard, for example, was polymetallic, with particularly strong shows of gold and zinc, but copper and silver were also present. However, the gold and silver encounters are highly promising in their own right.
The drilling at Orchard was testing coincident geochemical and geophysical anomalies, obtained from Chesterfield’s 2021 gravity and AMT surveys, adjacent to a large, regional structure. A single diamond drill hole, in 2018, had targeted the same structure and intercepted encouraging alteration (18AS01 – 1.10m @ 3.06g/t Au, 29.20g/t Ag, 0.11% Cu, 1.14% Zn & Pb 1.84% from 78.40m) but with additional geophysics it was determined that this drill hole may have stopped short of testing a deeper zone of mineralisation.
With increased targeting confidence coming from the 2021 geophysical campaigns, Chesterfield’s drill hole 21OR01 was designed to test deeper and intercepted three separate gold-rich polymetallic mineralised zones, including from 185.50m depth a 5.70m thick zone of semi-massive sulphides grading 2.27g/t Au, 6.32g/t Ag 0.42% Cu, 5.99% Zn within a broader 24.05m thick mineralised interval.
Drilling at the Evlim South and Evlim target followed on from the encouraging gold results in the 2020 and 2018 diamond drilling. A significant focus was placed on targeting extensions to this known gold mineralisation. The drilling stepped out to the west, south and southwest and identified that the historic near surface gold mineralisation from previous programmes continued at depth in these directions. Mineralisation is associated with polymetallic quartz veining and zones of silica clay alteration within pillow basalts.
Strong evidence of gold-rich polymetallic mineralised trend
The addition of these latest encouraging drill results provides further strong evidence of a significant gold-rich polymetallic mineralised trend of over 12km extending from the historic Limni mine in the northwest, through the Evlim and Orchard target areas, to the Westline target area in the southeast. An extensive 2022 field work programme is being designed to further test this underexplored mineralised trend in addition to further drill-testing of the gold-rich polymetallic mineralised zones at Orchard and Westline.
These results coupled with the encouraging results from the Westline target have provided several exciting targets for follow up field work and diamond drilling in 2022. In particular, it is believed that these thick gold-rich polymetallic sulphide zones intercepted at Westline and now Orchard are lateral gold-rich zones that can transition into copper-zinc-gold-silver rich cores of VMS-style sulphide deposits such as found at the Skouriotissa and Mavrovouni mines in Cyprus. The 2022 exploration programme will be focused on defining and drill-testing the most prospective massive sulphide targets in the vicinity of these gold-rich polymetallic zones at Westline and Orchard.
Shares in Chesterfield Resources were trading at 6.55p this morning in London (Wednesday). They have a 52 week high of 14.5p.
