Despite the many exploration dollars spent in the Fraser Range, both before and increasingly after the discovery of Nova in August 2012, nothing else of material significance has been discovered apart from Creasy’s Silver Knight in July 2018, ~25km NE on strike of Nova. At the dinner after the Nova visit ahead of Diggers in August 2019, it was stated that the three potentially promising “players” for the next discovery in the Fraser Range were regarded as Independence (IGO), Creasy (private) and Legend (LEG).

Part of the problem lies in the fact that the background nickel grade is ~0.5%Ni, so reports of “x” m at 0.5%Ni simply means a background intersection – and that is believed to be due to the Fraser Range nickel belt being underlain by a ~1.5km thick chronolith. Nova itself is thought to have been fed by a ~100m to 200m thick conduit, however, due to the EM shadow of Nova the conduit has been unable to be identified.

On the Nova site visit ahead of Diggers in August 2019, the current exploration plans for the coming year were included in a presentation released to the market (on August 2), involving many regional EM targets to be systematically followed up as shown in the figure. There is also a 9 drillhole programme to a depth of 500m below Nova and 2 drillholes to a depth of 1km below Nova, as shown in the figure.

The rationale behind the deeper drilling has been derived by combining EM spheres on seismics as also shown in the figure, and the fact that there are veins of chalcopyrite extending through the perceived garnet-quartz floor of the Nova mineralization. Chalcopyrite is thought to be one of the first minerals to drop out of the Ni-Cu package and chalcopyrite veins are thought to be peripheral to nickel sulphide orebodies, but may also link between nickel sulphide deposits/orebodies.

The current perceived formation of Nova is that it consists of a series of pulses of mineralization through a conduit (or conduits) over a period of time. One or more of these pulses resulted in the presence of garnet crystals in nickel mineralization as shown in the figure, which theoretically apparently should not exist – yet as the picture shows, it does.

The pulses explain why there are so many different variations of massive, breccia and stringer nickel mineralization present at Nova, with some drillcore from Silver Knight similar to that shown of Bollinger in the figure – despite the ~25km distance. The pulses also picked up rafts of various rocks such as sediments, mafic and even what resembled a granite and pegmatites as they were dragged into the system (as I saw on the underground visit). Such rafts could easily cause confusion in exploration drilling.

Hence there are so many potential targets along the length of the Fraser Range, plus potential at depth.

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Disclosure and Disclaimer : This article has been written by Keith Goode, the Managing Director of Eagle Research Advisory Pty Ltd, (an independent research company) who is a Financial Services Representative with State One Stockbroking (AFSL 247100).

Figure. Mineralisation and Exploration at Nova