East Africa-focused gold producer, developer and explorer Shanta Gold has intersected encouraging mineralisation at its Ilunga prospects, in south-west Tanzania.

Drilling at Ilunga forms part of Shanta Gold’s regional exploration programme within and surrounding its flagship asset, the New Luika gold mine, located in the Lupa goldfield. It is the second-largest goldfield in Tanzania, with the Lake Victoria goldfield being the largest.

“The existing indicated resource of 40 000 oz at Ilunga is open at depth and along strike to the west,” the company noted in a statement earlier this month.

A high-grade strike extension at depth and to the west of the currently defined orebody has been identified. The western strike extension is to form the focus of future work.

The company noted that preparation for a further phase of drilling at Ilunga was continuing, with preparation of additional drill sites also having started. Further drilling will resume once drill access roads have been prepared. Data from the drilling will be included in a subsequent resource update.

“The grades and thicknesses of the mineralised extensions to the Ilunga deposit are very encouraging . . . we are confident that further ongoing exploration has strong potential to further upgrade and extend the resource base at Ilunga,” Shanta Gold CEO Toby Bradbury noted.

The drilling programme has increased the definition of mineralisation at Ilunga by about 100 m, from about 100 m down-dip to about 200 m down-dip.

Drilling targeted about 200 m of the thus-far defined 400 m Ilunga strike expression judged to host plunging zones of gold enrichment identified during earlier work.

The nine-hole drilling programme intersected discernable, but variable evidence of mineralisation at depth in all holes, including 4 m at 6.54 g/t of gold from 143 m in hole CSR466, as well as 14.73 m at 14.31 g/t of gold from 166.89 m in hole CSD081.

Drilling programmes have also been completed at the Black Tree Hill mineral- ised prospects, located about 1 km south- west of the Luika gold mine processing plant. Extensions to prior resources were targeted at the prospect.

An eight-hole reverse circulation and diamond drilling programme to the mineralised zone was commissioned. According to Shanta Gold, Black Tree Hill was a focus for colonial gold miners that transported ore mined from subvertical underground stopes at the target to the nearby New Saza mine that was operational until 1956.

The Black Tree Hill deposit could be considered to be drilled out for plan- ning purposes, with an updated reserve to be declared in due course. Prior in-house estimates for the openpit reserve base, based on the 2012 resources at Black Tree Hill, were 145 000 t at 1.95 g/t for 9 000 oz of gold at $1 300 /oz.

The Black Tree Hill resource was updated from an indicated 57 178 oz to a measured 6 915 oz and an indicated 31 071 oz using a 0.5 g/t cutoff with greater certainty on grade and silver content.