Regency Mines (LON:RGM) announced to the market an exploration update on its Lake Johnstone Greenstone Belt project (click here to view). We took this opportunity to ask Chariman Andrew Bell to expand on this for investors. Here's what he had to say:
MM: Could you expand a little on the significance of today's update on exploration program at the Lake Johnstone greenstone belt.
AB: As can be seen from the aerial photographs showing the planned drill locations, these are working farms. There is cover over the whole area, with no rock exposure. It is therefore very different from a lot of the places we are used to exploring. Here, geophysics is the first tool, followed by geochemistry. But that only gets you so far. Then you have to drill, and only then do you discover whether there is anything there or whether your geophysics has given you false positives – anomalies that are meaningless from our point of view, because they could come for example, in the case of our drilling, from salinity or siltstones. So you don't initially do a full drill programme, but drill short holes to find out how much cover there is over the rocks, and what rocks they are, as well as, naturally, what they contain. In this case, we wanted to test the hypothesis in the south at target 1 that we had the jerdacuttup fault system, trending east-west, on which the Tropicana gold lies, and so the boundary between the yilgarn granites and the Albany-Fraser metamorphics to the south. In the north at targets 3 and (as an afterthought) 2 we wanted to test the hypothesis that the anomaly was in greenstone and potentially associated with nickel mineralisation. At target 1 we encountered the geological boundary as hoped and in ten holes encountered sulphides associated with the albany-fraser migmatites, schists and shales. At target 3 we encountered 1 km of greenstones under 30m of cover with some sulphides. The recent airborne geophysics that had hypothesised the extension of the greenstone belt under cover southward to this area seems validated. So now we see what the samples tell us, and then we drill, we expect, more and deeper. Will there be something exceptional from these first phase 1 samples? Odds against. Will there be something worth pursuing? Reasonable odds. So…
