Have to say I’m feeling like a part-owner in a syndicate horse that's in the last furlong of a gruelling Flemington two-miler. It’s emerged from the pack and all those punters who stayed solid and held onto their tickets as she struggled through the back straight slop are riding her home with first Tues in November-level enthusiasm.
Every ticked box on this journey has pointed to Mawson being ‘
the one’ and the potential winner’s cheque on offer is enormous.
In the Dec 2019 ‘
Hole 7 Watershed’ announcement (wasn’t that a lifetime ago?), the Fox said “
The 2.1m high grade intercept within a 14.9m sulphide zone within a 70m disseminated sulphide halo has all the hallmarks of a large mineralised system.”
That hit came at a depth of 114m and with it, the not unreasonable expectation LEG was dealing with a Nova-type body (~180m sub-surface, signposted by a 1000m x 220m EM conductor, refer Figure 3 below). And that would be readily definable via systematic step out.
But it soon became evident Mawson was an entirely different beast. Nova was an ~500m x 400m x 80m lens hosted in a suite of intrusive mafic rocks. Mawson proved to be a kilometres-long chonolith snaking across the upper stratigraphic package before turning under itself and heading back deeper across a fault that divorced the three subsequently identified zones of massive accumulations upstairs from whatever source squirted all that tonnage to the surface nearly two billion years ago.
From the jump, the Fox believed that source was “
big and close” and at last year’s Diggers and Dealers, ED, Exploration, Oliver Kiddie revealed vectoring pointed to a keel lurking deep under Mawson.
Then came the eagerly awaited ‘
Seismic Data Modelling Lights Up Mawson’ announcement which, among other things, noted ‘
The results highlight the excellent correlation between the seismic dataset and the existing detailed constrained gravity inversion' (see Figure 5 and Figure 6).
Enormously encouraging given the announcement went on to say ‘
The newly acquired 3D seismic data supports the exploration model at Mawson, that a large intrusive source continues at depth below drilling completed to date. 3D seismic reflectors clearly map the mineralised chonolith in drilled areas down to 500m below surface. The chonolith is interpreted to extend below 500m, below the Mawson fault, to a possible keel position at ~800m to 1,000m.’
So, not only is LEG’s modelling validated but also the Fox’s long-held adamance that what he’s been hunting is big, and close. Fig 4 in the seismic report suggests he was dead right, with the sneaky bugger potentially hiding just offset from the initial discovery zone:
And if the first hole (due to turn this week)
does pierce the nut sack, we may well find the bloody thing's been hiding in clear sight all this time!!
Exciting days ahead and given it’s always good to dream, thought I’d leave with this slide from Sirius MD Mark Bennett’s presentation to the 2012 Australian Nickel Conference, just two months after the Nova discovery:
Life changing stuff. But I'll toss in two additional factors for all you LEG true believers to ponder:
1. The D8 FLTEM conductor coincidental with Mawson’s seismic-identified target zone is 1000m x 1000m.
Four times the size of Nova’s 1000m x 220m conductor;
2. In July 2012, the nickel price stood at USD16,128/ton. Today, that figure has
doubled to USD34,037/ton.
I'm betting there's gonna be a few sleepless nights over the next few weeks. Bring. It. On.
(20min delay)