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 Regional Setting
Exploration Potential
Many of the tenements within Sovereign’s Mount Isa Block portfolio
were originally applied for to cover composite (i.e. geological, geochemical & structural)
targets, identified as having signatures analogous to world-class base metal
deposits such as Mount Isa and Century and Cu-Au deposits such as Ernest
Henry. Many of the target areas occur in highly prospective lithological
units and are also closely associated with major faults of regional significance
(Figure 1). A number of the target areas identified contain a number
of small historical mines, workings, and mineral occurrences. These
can be considered to be composite multi-element regionally anomalous geochemical
features that be related to large hidden mineral deposits.
Basement outcrop is present over much of the project areas, although partly
obscured by soil and alluvial cover. Prospectors and early exploration
companies found considerable mineralisation in the region, but some significant
deposits, such as Tick Hill, Selwyn, Rosebery, and Rocklands have been developed
or discovered only recently. Modern exploration has been successful
in discovering numerous geochemical and geophysical anomalies, however not
all have been adequately tested.
In the east, Mesozoic and Cainozoic cover has limited effective exploration
to the drilling of geophysical anomalies. This exploration strategy
has been successful at Ernest Henry, Eloise, Cannington, and Osborne. Some
anomalies have been tested with negative results. Others remain to
be outlined and/or to be tested. In the case of those altered systems that
have been tested by only a few drill holes, the lack of significant mineralisation
in those holes should not lead to the assumption that a significant deposit
is not present elsewhere within the system or an adjacent system.
Figure 1: Regional Geological Map
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