Greatland Gold shares surge as it begins WA drilling

Precious and base metals exploration and development Greatland Gold announced on Tuesday that drilling has commenced at its Ernest Giles project in Western Australia.

The AIM-traded firm said the current drilling programme includes plans for approximately 6,000 metres of RC drilling on a wide-spaced grid pattern.

The key objectives of the current RC drilling campaign are to follow up on previous drilling and soil sampling that identified gold, arsenic and antimony anomalies and to identify targets for follow up exploration, the board said.

Greatland also announced that it has expanded its interest in the region by applying for an additional three contiguous licences covering a further 775 square kilometres of the greenstone belt.

“We are very pleased to have commenced drilling at our 100% owned Ernest Giles project,” said executive director Callum Baxter.

“We hope that this ambitious, wide-spaced RC drilling programme will offer us further insight into a portion of a large greenstone belt that remains relatively unexplored and that this campaign will offer up some interesting targets for follow up exploration.”

Baxter said the board wanted to remind investors that the larger greenstone belts in Western Australia host a significant proportion of the multiple million ounce gold deposits found to date in the state.

“It is our intention is determine whether similar deposits may be hosted within this remote and largely unexplored greenstone belt.

“In order to best protect our shareholders' interests, Greatland has made application for an additional three contiguous licences covering 775 square kilometres of greenstone taking the company's total project area to over 1,000 square kilometres and covering more than 120 km of strike of gold prospective rocks,” Baxter explained.

He said the opportunity to secure 100% ownership of a large greenstone sequence is a unique opportunity as the company aims to tap the potential of this large project.

“We expect the drilling programme will take up to six weeks to complete with assay results to follow.

“We will continue to announce developments at the Ernest Giles project over the weeks ahead as drilling progresses.”

At 1346 BST, shares in Greatland Gold were up 25.86% at 0.18p.