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Glass Earth drills first of 10 holes into 5km-long Muirs prospect
16 September 2008, Source: Glass Earth Gold and Lindsay Clark - Wellington-based gold exploration company Glass Earth Gold has drilled the first of 10 holes into its 5km-long Muirs Reef prospect near Te Puke in the North Island’s Bay of Plenty region.
Simon Henderson, chief executive officer of Glass Earth Gold, reported to the AusIMM minerals conference in Wellington, that the first hole intersected a broad zone of fractured brecciated quartz veining had proved difficult drilling. Assay results were not yet available, he said.
The property was host to a former producing gold mine discovered in 1895. Gold was mined from two quartz reefs, Muirs and Masseys in a shallow open pit and from three underground levels.
The mine produced a total of 43,642 oz by the 1930s.
In a report to the Toronto Stock Exchange Glass Earth Gold says the first diamond drill hole was drilled beneath a surface channel across the Muirs reef which earlier explorers reported a grade of 20m @ 4.9 grams a tonne of gold.
Exploratory drilling is anticipated to be near-continuous over the next few months on this area encompassing the extensions to the north (Otawa) and to the south (Gibraltar).
This epithermal gold prospect conjoins into one large continuous alteration and quartz veined system over 5,000 m in length.
The whole prospect was a typical epithermal gold system with the veins of outcropping banded and colloform textured quartz veins, quartz breccia, and vein swarms mapped up to 20 m wide in the historical open pit.
