Vancouver-headquartered zinc explorer Group Eleven’s share price surged nearly 40% on Monday, as the company announced its "best-ever mineralisation" at the PG West project in Ireland.

The company intersected 10.3 m of 14.6% zinc, 5% lead (19.6% combined) and 43 g/t silver during its drilling programme.

The mineralisation is shallow, open along strike and represents not only the best mineralisation ever encountered at the Carrickittle prospect (Carrickittle), but also the best mineralisation Group Eleven has drilled since inception of the company in early 2015, Group Eleven said in a statement.

The Carrickittle prospect is located in the Limerick basin, in south-western Ireland and lies within the Pallas Green Corridor, a 25-km-long trend of mineralisation defined by the Pallas Green deposit in the north and Group Eleven’s Carrickittle, Ballywire and Denison prospects to the south.

Group Eleven CEO Bart Jaworski said the thickness of massive sulphides and associated grades reaching as high as 55.7% zinc and lead, was a much better result than expected. “This intercept represents a breakthrough in our understanding of how mineralisation is oriented at Carrickittle and offers a compelling hypothesis as to why historic drilling missed or seemingly only skimmed along areas of mineralisation.”

He added that finding such high-grade mineralisation at shallow depths was a “very rare occurrence these days” and it was “highly encouraging” for Group Eleven.

“Carrickittle is a prospect that lay largely dormant for over 54 years after it was labelled as ‘sub-economic’ in 1966. The prospect, however, now clearly appears under-drilled and under-conceptualised, and requires immediate follow-up.”

Of particular interest, the recently drilled hole G11-2840-04 was designed to test the hypothesis that historic (1965/66) drilling at the prospect, in hindsight, was oriented in the wrong direction (all historic holes were drilled towards the south and west, or vertical. G11-2840-04 was oriented due east (90° with a dip of -45°) and designed to scissor (drill perpendicular to) historic hole P18 which intersected a number of high-grade intervals over about 25 m downhole.

Carrickittle was discovered in 1965 by Tara Exploration and was drilled throughout 1965 and 1966 with 33 holes. Follow-up work in the late 1960s and 1970s largely focussed on regional exploration in the area with an emphasis on soil geochemistry and ground geophysical surveys, as well as, geological mapping. In 1981, Billiton drilled seven vertical holes in a wide-spaced pattern forming a semi-circle on the northern side of the prospect, returning only weak mineralisation.

To Group Eleven’s knowledge, previous operators did not focus on the exact orientation and controls of mineralisation at Carrickittle and little work (outside a few shallow holes) was done to test the North-West oriented faults in the area. Group Eleven claim that, based on the large number of vertical holes drilled, previous operators “appear to have been searching for flat-lying mineralisation” (as opposed to steeply-dipping). Historic exploration also tended to follow an east-west direction, along the strike of the prospective horizon.

Results from G11-2840-04 demonstrate that the historic P18 hole appears to have skimmed about parallel along the top of a zone of massive sulphide which dips moderately steeply to the west.

Group Eleven highlighted that a number of new and important datapoints emerged from hole G11-2840-04, including a thick, continuous and high-grade massive sulphide body existed at Zone 1 at Carrickittle, the orientation of the massive sulphide body appeared to be moderately steeply dipping to the west, the massive sulphides were associated with a fault zone which dips steeply to the west or southwest and is interpreted to strike north-south or northwest.

Consequently, Group Eleven now believes three other zones of known mineralisation at Carrickittle require immediate follow-up and reinterpretation, along with a number of northwest-trending faults in the area, which appear to be parallel to the fault controlling mineralization in G11-2840-0.

Group Eleven’s stock traded 38% higher at C$0.09 apiece on Monday, up from the previous closing price of C$0.065 a share.