Castle Minerals has mobilized a field team to undertake an intensive 10-day exploration campaign of mapping, sampling and metal detecting along the prospective geologically unconformable contacts between the Lower Fortescue stratigraphy and the underlying older Archean rocks at its Coolyia Creek and Beasley Creek projects in Western Australia’s Pilbara region.
The prime objective is to track in detail these contacts and any associated Mt Roe and Hardy Formation conglomerate horizons and to test for Witwatersrand-style conglomerate-hosted gold mineralisation.
Castle’s geologists will be accompanied by two expert metal detectorists (vendors of the Coolyia Creek project) who will traverse some 10km strike of prospective unconformable contacts at Coolyia Creek and 16km strike at Beasley Creek as well as investigate for gold nuggets around historical workings and prospector scrapings.
Mt Roe and Hardy Formation conglomerate horizons occurring at these unconformable contact zones on Castle’s licences are analogous geological settings to gold mineralisation at the Purdy’s Reward project near Karratha and at the Beaton’s Creek deposit near Nullagine respectively.
Orientation visits to both of Castle’s Projects have already confirmed that they tick many of the boxes for the discovery of ‘Witwatersrand-style’ conglomerate hosted gold mineralisation including the presence of both Mt Roe and Hardey Formation conglomerates at Coolyia Creek and the latter at Beasley Creek. Open file technical reports covering the Beasley Creek area also refer to Mt Roe Formation and conglomerates but this is yet to be confirmed in the field.