And without laboring the point, it does look as though this first 134 samples of the ongoing 4,000-sample Wilki surface sampling program, which set out to target amongst other gold deposit types a 'Telfer analogue', may have successfully discovered exactly that: a genuine Telfer analogue.
The geological structure that hosts the Telfer Gold Deposit is known as the 'Telfer Dome'. In vertical section, this is rather like a stack of upturned breakfast bowls, piled one on top of another. And the gold mineralising fluids have come up along faults from below, and been trapped in the 'upturned bowls', to produce a stack of what are known in the Victorian Goldfields as 'saddle reefs'. It is similar to the dome-shaped fold structures that trap oil and gas in younger sedimentary rocks.
In detail though, both the Telfer Dome, and the adjoining West Dome are strongly elongate, in a NW-SE direction, with quite pointy ends (see first image below), so these structures are really what are known as a 'doubly plunging anticlines'. And the blue line running NW-SE down the middle of each of these domes, with pairs of tiny blue arrows pointing away to the NE and SW on either side, is the 'anticlinal axis'.
And now, if you look at the second image below of the gold-hosting 'Parkland' structure, you can see that this is a similar anticlinal structure (blue line with paired arrows marking the axis). However, Parkland only has the SE pointy end of the anticlinal structure: it is a singly-plunging anticline. And it is this pointy, SE closure of the singly-plunging Parklands anticline that appears to be hosting gold mineralisation and producing the lag sampling gold anomaly in overlying soils.
There may of course be a mirror-image, pointy anticlinal closure some way off to the NW, not yet defined by the geophysics. Or there may have been one once, which has since been chopped off and moved by later faulting. But whatever the case, it is fair to say that the Parklands structure is a similar type of gold hosting geological structure to the one that hosts the Telfer Gold Deposit.
Parklands is indeed a 'Telfer Analogue'. Success!
And successfully finding a Telfer analogue is good! Why? Because Telfer was a VERY large gold deposit. It had a 32M oz pre-mining gold endowment. It is a world class gold deposit. A Newmont-sized discovery. And one of the reasons it is so big is because these 'saddle-reef' gold-mineralised structures repeat, vertically, again and again, as you go down through the stack of upturned 'breakfast bowls'. (The last time I was at Telfer, 27 years ago, the mine had a project called the 'Mariner Deeps' with a vertical diamond hole over a kilometre deep, still going down through additional reefs)
So this is not just an exciting, near-surface, potentially open-pittable gold discovery. It could be a very large one, in both surface area and vertical extent.
I like it!
As would any geologist.
(20min delay)