Where is this 24.6m thick pegmatite they speak of?

If this is the best 8 metres of "pegmatite" in that 24m I'd hate to see the rest. Could get ugly when the assays come in.




This is what good spod peg looks like:




I don't see a lot of spodumene in that Osborne peg. What's there is very patchy. Lots of assimilated country rock and silica flooding and fractured gangue and micas.

Of course it doesn't matter if the spod is patchy when your taking rock chips because they can be very selective in what they put in the sample bag. Diamond core tells the truth.

That tongue of granite in the footwall of the "pegmatite" could be messing things up too and could explain all the fracturing and silica flooding.




Looks like they just sterilised everything north of the Osborne trend as well with that hole. Nothing more than a metre or two thick. Funny how the mapping has the pegmatites much, much wider than the truth telling core.

Components of Lithium Depletion from Starting Spodumene—Petalite Assemblages in Subsolidus Evolution of Portuguese Pegmatites

In Portugal, especially in the NW region, mineral assemblages with spodumene after petalite and petalite only are hosted in pegmatite bodies, which intrude metasedimentary to metavolcanic, Silurian, or earlier formations. Regardless of the region in which they occur, this paragenesis and the pegmatites that support them are affected by evolutionary trends of deuteric to supergenic alteration that may lead to lithium leaching and severe depletion of early contents sequestered in starting materials. That has relevant consequences for the recovery of Li resources, not only by the generalized lowering of the Li grades of pegmatite deposits but also by the multiplication of Li-specific carrier phases, which penalizes the recovery percentages during any mineralurgy routines. Predictably, recovered grades will be significantly lower than those obtained by chemical analysis of whole rock and channel pegmatite samples.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-25986-9_17