Hey gang,
Here's my thoughts on this announcement. There's a few layers here that I've tried to piece together as best I can.
Firstly, this gives us our most likely target for finding gold. Pyrite can be a "leader" or "marker" for gold, which means in certain deposits, where you find pyrite, you will find gold. That means that, after you've done enough sampling, you can dig around for pyrite and know that gold will be nearby. It doesn't work all of the time, as you can have gold without pyrite and pyrite without gold, but it can be useful.
This important, because, as the announcement points out, Novo has lots of pyrite in the conglomerates they have dug up. Do a search for "pyrite" in this announcement to see what I mean:
http://novoresources.com/_resources/news/2018-02-14.pdf
So the presence of pyrite gives us both a continuing similarity to the ground that Novo is exploring, and it gives us our most likely horizon for finding gold.
The fact that it is 11.6m thick is encouraging, as previously it looked like it was only 4m thick:
View attachment 1207926
View attachment 1207934
Notice also, when you put these two photos side by side, you can see the little stars showing where the nuggets were found. One was where the pyrite conglomerate comes to surface, and the other two were just downhill from that. It is possible that these shed from further up the hill, but it is more likely that they shed from the pyritic conglomerate.
So Jarret Well has ~40m of conglomerate. There may be some gold in the rest of it, but the most likely section to have it is the ~11.5m of pyrite conglomerate. All of it will be sampled with the 250kg samples, as it is too early days to rule anything out, but most likely the pyrite conglomerate is what will receive the larger bulk sampling after that.
The other marker that Novo has found, the tuff, isn't mentioned at all. That may be because it isn't there, because it just isn't in the section they drilled (it's only one hole, after all) or they just haven't logged it yet. The announcement states they are yet to do the full geological logging, so perhaps they will find tuff as they cut the core up and sample it.
There's another detail that I think is overshadowed here, which is that they have continued mapping JW, and found that it now has a strike of 1.5km. It was previously 0.55km, so it has almost tripled in strike length. That's a big jump!
It would also mean that JW is longer than Louden's, and it may be thicker. I've drawn an arrow here pointing in the direction they have extended it:
View attachment 1207946
All in all, it is a reasonably good announcement. There's nothing here to get the punters too excited about, which is borne out by very little volume today, but it shows a steady, considered approach being undertaken as far as I'm concerned.
Next up is the drilling at Steel Well, which has already started. Depending on when that began, we may have another update by the end of the week. They're just showing us photos of the core and explaining the interpretation, so there is no delay in waiting for lab results. It can be done in the field.
Anyway, SW is thought to be 80m thick, but the company considers there may be greater thickness that is not yet outcropping, so it could be even bigger. As discussed above, the thickness of the overall conglomerate may not matter as much as the thickness of the pyrite conglomerate, but the thicker the overall section, the more room there is for a thick pyrite section. Fingers crossed.
Cheers