Columbus Gold has made a high-grade gold discovery at the Maripa gold project located in French Guiana, South America.
Maripa adjoins to the south the Boulanger project which is being developed by Reunion Gold, where high-grade gold discovery was reported recently.
In July 2018, Columbus signed an agreement with IAMGOLD for an option to acquire up to a 70% stake in Maripa.
Located in eastern French Guiana, Maripa is approximately 50km south of the capital city of Cayenne. The project comprises of five contiguous exploration permits that cover an area of 120km2.
Following the prospecting, Columbus identified several artisanal mine works 800 metres to the south of the previous producing Changement mine, located within the northern part of the Maripa property.
According to the company, sampling of stockpiles extracted from the mine workings returned 15 assay values above 1 g/t gold.
The newly discovered gold mine zone is identified to be different from the Changement mine and remains completely unexplored.
Columbus said that Filon Dron and Changement, two of the five partially drill-defined gold zones at Maripa, were prioritised for comprehensive evaluation, extension drilling and resource definition.
Columbus president and CEO Rock Lefrançois said: “Field work in the Filon Dron and Changement areas in the last few months has already uncovered two new gold mineralised structures with high-grade potential.
“The initial work confirms that the local geological setting is highly prospective and underexplored”.
Past exploration at Maripa
Past exploration at Maripa consists of 134 core holes, for a total of 9,000 metres. The exploration partially defined five broad gold zones, namely Changement, Filon Dron, Maripa Sud-Est, Rhyodacite and Filon Scieur.
Columbus said that the geological setting at Maripa is similar IAMGOLD’s s Rosebel gold mine (15.2Moz) in Suriname, highlighted by a faulted contact between volcanic assemblages of the Paramaca Formation and younger pull-apart basin coarse detrital sediments of the Upper Detrital Unit (UDU or Rosebel Formation).
