St Ives gold mine - Exploration and Resource definition drilling
2016/2017 exploration expenditures are presented in the Australia regional section.
St Ives continuously explores the 112,092ha of managed tenement holding to discover new Mineral Resources. The site exploration team is supported by in-house geophysics, regional and corporate technical teams. Rigorous sampling and assaying QA/QC protocols are maintained on all exploration programmes. Industry leading practice is applied for data acquisition and accredited assay laboratories are used which are regularly reviewed both internally and externally.
In 2017, extensional exploration targeted the Invincible UG trend, Hamlet extensions, the Central Corridor, and infill drilling and extensions to Justice. Additional brownfield exploration is focusing on the Eastern Causeway, Kambalda West and the Speedway trends using a combination of aircore and reverse circulation drilling, geochemistry and geophysics to generate an integrated prospectivity model to direct future investment. The Speedway trend is a 20km plus prospective belt where exploration success was achieved in 2017, extending the Invincible group of deposits. Systematic geochemical testing of the entire trend will be completed in 2018. A 3D Seismic Cube was surveyed over the Victory Defiance complex in Q3 2017. Data from this survey will be interpreted in 2018, with targets generated to be tested in 2018 and 2019.
Significant mineralisation has been identified along strike of Invincible South in the Greater Invincible area. This, along with the existing mineralised systems at Invincible Deep and Invincible South will be further developed and expanded through 2018. The Kambalda West and Southern St Ives areas are under-explored to date with continued exploration drilling planned for 2018.