NCM Fangtooth Drilling ReportNCM were awarded a co-funding grant...

NCM Fangtooth Drilling Report

NCM were awarded a co-funding grant for greenfields diamond drilling in June 2021 under Round 14 of NTGS’s Resourcing the Territory initiative. https://resourcingtheterritory.nt.gov.au/about/exploration-grants/round-14-successful-projects

Under the conditions for the grant, field work had to be completed by 1 Dec 2021, and a publicly accessible report provided 6 months after completion of field work. The report “must address all content points” in the “Final Report Template” and there will be much of interest if NCM comply.

https://grantsnt.nt.gov.au/grants/round-14

NTGS provides the Fangtooth location and a minimal summary (3 holes x up to 1000m) here:

https://resourcingtheterritory.nt.gov.au/about/gdc

NCM do not mention Fangtooth directly in their quarterly Exploration Updates and Exploration Reports (https://hotcopper.com.au/posts/58336454/single) and as far as I know, there is no publicly available data confirming how many Fangtooth holes were drilled, where, when and to what depth, but the NCM reports do indicate they stopped drilling at East Tennant in October “pending the wet season” with plans to recommence in “calendar year 2022” on “defined coincident gravity, magnetic and IP targets”.

If the October indication is correct, and NCM comply with the 6 month condition (extension requests for covid and assay results?), then the Fangtooth report may become available in April, when hopefully we will be waiting for assay results from our first deep Mt Lamb drill hole.

SER were also awarded a drilling grant in Round 14, and the location on the NTGS interactive map for the SER drilling corresponds well with were SER drilled Cottage. This gives some confidence that the NTGS Fangtooth location also corresponds with were NCM drilled.

The following map is an extract from NTGS’s Magnetic Map of the Northern Territory (https://geoscience.nt.gov.au/gemis/ntgsjspui/handle/1/82589) overlaid with East Tennant prospect and drilling data including the presumed Fangtooth location. This regional magnetic map highlights the locations of high magnetic intensity and you can see that Fangtooth and Mt Lamb are both such locations with Mt Lamb being a lot bigger. The high magnetic intensity is a reason I am interested in Fangtooth.



The next map is also a magnetic map extracted from MDI’s 4Q2021 Report which zooms in on the Fangtooth location. I have added the ex-NDI 03 cut-out block and the locations of NDIBK03 and DDH005. DDH005 figured prominently in Geoscience Australia’s presentations promoting East Tennant as evidence of the correlation of deep MT and nearer surface AusAEM conductivity. DDH005 is above a Finger of God.



Another point of interest is Fangtooth’s location on the edge of a gravity high ridge as shown in this final map:



Finally, according to Clark et al (Geoscience Australia) ’s map of the Palaeoproterozoic bedrock at East Tennant (https://hotcopper.com.au/posts/52767705/single), Fangtooth would have been drilled into Alroy Formation bedrock. This is in contrast to SER’s Cottage and GRV’s Twin Peaks for which the map predicts undifferentiated Warramunga Province bedrock, as found in the Tennant Creek region, with its subset of IOCG deposits, smaller but richer in gold than other notable Australian IOCG deposits, and hence opening the possibility of something larger.

Notwithstanding the uncertainties associated with Fangtooth drilling, I am looking forward to NCM’s Report and if it doesn’t arrive in April, then it should by 1 June, six months after NTGS’s limit for completing field activities.