Botswana is well known for its wildlife, with lions, leopards, elephants, and all manner of other beautiful animals calling its sprawling savannahs home.
The big game we’re interested in at our Ditau project, however, lies under the earth rather than on top of it.
Indeed, because of the extensive Kalahari sands covering the area of Botswana in which the project is based, very little is known about what lies beneath the surface.
So, after gathering encouraging results from our initial surveying and mapping last year, we decided that we needed to drill to learn more.
Accordingly, in conjunction with our joint venture partner Power Metal Resources, we signed off on the targets we planned to drill at Ditau in March of this year. By the following month, we had already set the rigs turning, and the work continues to this day.
Our ultimate plan is to drill a total of six holes across three targets. The latest hole–into what we’ve dubbed the i10 target–has now completed.
At this stage, we’re still awaiting assays. However, as announced, it does initially appear that our drilling intercepted our targeted magnetic anomaly at the expected depth. In other words–so far so good.
This anomaly has a diameter of 2.2 kilometres, and we think there’s a possibility that it could be a carbonatite, in the fashion of other bodies discovered in the area in the seventies by Falconbridge.
However, the cores we extracted from the second hole have also given us an intriguing precious metals lead. The 29m “Zone of Interest” is like nothing any member of our team has seen before.
Whatever the assays return, there appears to be a lot going on in these rocks.
How did we get here?
What led us into this exploration campaign was the identification on our ground of several ‘ring structures’ of the kind we’ve just drilled at i10.
These in turn lie on a known trend of kimberlites and carbonatites that run across the northwest of Botswana and down into Namibia.
The ‘ring structures’ themselves were identified using geophysics, and often appear to be quite crater-like. Their size varies–they can be anything from a hundred metres to a couple of kilometres across–and handily, they are not usually that deep.
Of course, depth is a relative term when it comes to a junior mining company. But when set against some of our other operations, particularly the KSZ, drilling to 389 meters at the i10 target doesn’t seem overly ambitious.
Each of the three targets we’re drilling at Ditau has a different geophysical signature, and so it’ll be quite a steep learning curve when the assay results come back.
Already, though, there are some big positives.
Preliminary magnetic susceptibility readings taken on the core from the recently completed hole at i10 were highly elevated on material drawn from a depth between 293 and 321 metres. These readings coincide with a visibly altered section of the rock, so we are awaiting the assay lab results with considerable interest.
What’s more, sections of the core also contain siliceous and haematitic zones, which may be conducive to mineralization.
Ultimately, of course, what we’re looking for is elevated levels of any minerals, whether rare earths or precious metals, above what are known as ‘crustal norms’. If we get it, we’ll then be able to zone in on the richest areas.
The assay labs are busy at the moment, so it’s not clear how long we’ll have to wait before we know one way or the other for the holes we’ve already drilled.
In the meantime, our drilling continues.
