IDA's tenement is situated around the Nachingwea area in South...

IDA's tenement is situated around the Nachingwea area in South East Tanzania. This area is better known for graphite and nickel.

ASX companies such as SYR and MNS have graphite deposits in the area. We know the area is prospective for graphite but I was curious whether there is any evidence of gold in the Nachingwea area which IDA is targeting in this current round of drilling.

Upon doing some research, there is evidence of artisanal gold mining in the Nachingwea area. Nambungu mine is an artisanal hard rock mine in the area with shallow gold (artisinally mined to 50 metres deep), good grades of ore and also has evidence of arsenic association with the gold.

This gold-arsenic correlation is interesting as it is also a feature that IDA has reported numerous times in their own soil sampling reports when referring to their Naujombo and Kishugu gold prospects. I'm looking forward to the RAB drill results to see what they come up with.

Below is an extract of some key lines regarding Nambungu mine, an artisanal gold mine in the same Nachingwea region as IDA.


Nambungu

The Nambungu site, located about 50 km northeast from Nachingwea, demonstrated small scale mining of gold and garnets, which are extracted from hard rock under the ground. The operations started as gemstone mining in 1999, but soon, in 2002, the miners discovered a gold rich quartz layer and currently the gemstone extraction has only a minor role.

The ore is extracted from a gently sloping horizontal layer. The shallowest shafts used to reach 10-20 meters, but nowadays most shafts are around 30 meters deep and the deepest reach even 50 meters.

According to a few analyses made by a portable XRF-device carried by the team the ore contained notable amounts of arsenic with measured values being up to 270 ppm.

It can be assumed that the average gold concentration of the deposit is high. The workers did not reveal the concentration but told how much gold can be obtained from the sacks delivered from different parts of the mine site. The numbers indicate that the gold concentration of the ore is several tens of ppm’s. It is also likely that the gold concentration of such a coarse gold containing deposit varies much in different parts of the mine site.






Full report below:

http://wiki.gtk.fi/documents/64672/65120/Assessment of ASM in Nachingwea.pdf