Uranium Equities Ltd, with the assistance of PACE Initiative Year 5 drilling project partial subsidy funds, have completed a greenfields exploration drilling programme to look for possible buried sedimentary uranium mineralisation on the western...
Uranium Equities Ltd, with the assistance of PACE Initiative Year 5 drilling project partial subsidy funds, have completed a greenfields exploration drilling programme to look for possible buried sedimentary uranium mineralisation on the western edge of the Eromanga Basin in South Australia, at the company's remotely located Lake Blanche Project tenements. During June-July 2009 eight vertical rotary mud drillholes for a total penetration of 2776 m were completed and geophysically wireline logged to test the Tertiary (Namba and Eyre Formations) and Mesozoic (Winton Formation) basinal sediment sequences for the suitability of their sands to host roll-front uranium mineralisation. In particular the upper Mesozoic sands were targeted, in order to test an exploration concept based on Kazakhstan - style uranium mineralisation, where economic such deposits are found to occur at depths from 200 m to in excess of 500 m, and as far distant as 200 km from their uraniferous source rocks. Although this style of deposit is not yet known in Australia, there appear to be numerous similarities between the Lake Blanche region and the geological setting of uranium deposits in the Chu-Saryssu and Syrdarya Basins of Kazakhstan. Drillhole locations were chosen at an average 10-15 km apart along the western side of the Strzelecki Track, to ensure that a broad-spaced regional transect over the tenement from south to north was obtained. The principal objectives were to map any large-scale oxidation-reduction alteration cells within sand units, to understand the mega-structure of the basins in this area, and to assess the extent to which uranium is moving through target Mesozoic and Tertiary sands. The upper Mesozoic Winton Formation was found generally to consist of reduced, interbedded fine grained siltstones and minor fine sandstone units, with little evidence of any well-developed sand horizons within the top 200 m of the formation, and it appears to lack oxidation fronts. The drilling revealed widespread medium-coarse grained sandstone horizons in the Tertiary, with good continuity between widely spaced drillholes. Slightly elevated XRF uranium values recorded from regionally-correlatable Eyre Formation sands in holes LB002 and LB007 (13 and 23 ppm U respectively) indicates that uranium is present in the Tertiary system. In addition, a redox cell appears to have developed between holes LB007 and LB008 in the north of the project area. Downhole gamma log responses peaking at 50 ppm eU3O8 in hole LB002 are similar in character to those reported from other drilling recently carried out 50 kilometres north of Uranium Equities' Sturt Joint Venture tenements, thereby indicating that uranium could have been (or is still being) transported basinwards via a large-scale groundwater fluid flow system. The Kazakhstan experience suggests that multiple oxidation fronts can occur regionally at different levels throughout the host stratigraphic sequence. Therefore the potential for the Eyre Formation sands to host roll-front mineralisation has been upgraded for this area.
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