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Haimur – Gold (Gippsland 50%)
Location
The mine is situated on the northwest slope of Gebel Haimur some 13km to the north-west of the Um Garayat mine, at Latitude 22o 37' 56" N and Longitude 33o 18' 06"E, close to the junction of Wadis Haimur and Allaqi.
Historical mining
The mine at Haimur is an ancient mine that has been worked successively by the ancient Egyptians, Romans and the British. The more recent work by the British was by the Nile Valley Company Ltd during 1904-07. Production by the British is in the order of 215t tons of ore which was treated through the Um Garayat mill. It is estimated that total production from the mine may have been in the order of 15,000t from underground and 3,000t from the surface workings based on the displaced volumes. The mining activities focussed almost entirely on high-grade quartz veins with only very minor alluvial workings.
Geological setting
The geological setting is a typical melange comprised of blocks of mafic and ultramafic rocks thrusted into a siltstone matrix. The area is made up of strongly schistose and lineated fine-grained grey dominantly intermediate volcanics. The schist belt of Haimur includes ankerite, talc and tremolite slices. Much of the Haimur belt shows a stacked duplex system geometry, which is probably related to the competent biotite, sericite-dominant felspathic schist of sedimentary origin.
Mineralisation
Gold mineralisation is confined to two quartz vein systems, composed mainly of quartz, calcite, dolomite, white mica, iron oxides after pyrite-chalcopyrite-graphite and native gold. Graphite accompanies the veins along the vein margins and enclosed in the vein matter.
Exploration
Geological mapping has identified a large shear zone trending parallel to the historical workings some 50-250m to the northwest along which three occurrences of placer gold workings have been located.
Twenty 10m channel samples from the banks of the wadis were collected in a series of offset traverses across the shear zone. The samples contained anomalous gold values with a maximum value of 169ppb.
A program of regolith sampling on a 200m x 50m grid over a strike length of 1,400m was completed over the largely alluvial covered area and delineated two northeast trending gold anomalies corresponding with a large shear and the anomalous wadi bank samples. Within this area some 100m x 50m sampling was completed in the vicinity of the Haimur South workings.
A mechanical excavator was used to dig thirteen trenches at Haimur to test regolith anomalies. The trenching results confirmed the presence of anomalous gold values within the bedrock. The best intersection was 5m at 44.45g/t in trench HT9. The results are considered to be very encouraging as they confirm the presence of anomalous gold in the bedrock closely associated with zones of shearing.
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