Iamgold has reported positive results from exploration drilling on its wholly owned Karita project in northeast Guinea. The project is located along the prolific Senegal-Mali shear zone between the company’s Boto gold project in Senegal to the north and its Diakha-Siribaya project in Mali to the south.
The Karita project is held under an exploration permit that covers approximately 99.85 km2 along the borders with Senegal and Mali.
In 2017, Iamgold completed a reconnaissance geology and termite-mound geochemical sampling program over the permit to evaluate the interpreted extension of the Boto-Diakha mineralized trend. The program identified an extensive gold geochemical anomaly over a nearly 2-km strike length.
The 2019 drilling program was designed to evaluate the anomaly for the presence of mineralization and involved completion of wide-spaced lines of reverse circulation drilling over a 1.6-km strike length. The program has confirmed the presence of multiple zones of wide intervals of mineralization hosted within an albite-hematite-carbonate altered sandstone metasedimentary unit.
The results of this drilling are being compiled and integrated with data from the Boto and Diakha-Siribaya projects to help guide future drilling, with the objectives of defining the extents of the mineralization and evaluating the resource potential of the new discovery. The program will include twinning reverse circulation holes with diamond holes to confirm the widths and orientation of mineralized intervals and help establish the structural and geological characteristics of the mineralizing system.
