New discovery made in old copper mine in Northern Cape Province, South Africa
The South African Copper 360 Company (Copper360) has made new discoveries in the old copper mining area in the Northern Cape Province of the country.
The new discovery was made near the old mines of Tweefontein. The company's geological team discovered a 1.5-kilometer-long magnetic anomaly zone through drone magnetic survey, including four obviously different copper anomalies.
Surface sampling confirmed that the copper grade of the first abnormal zone ranged from 2.12% to 17.47%.
Follow-up drilling confirmed that the anomaly had a bandwidth of 4-8 meters and a drilling depth of 50 meters without penetration. The main ore conditions are: 5.8 meters thick, copper grade 2.71%; 13 meters thick, copper grade 4.69%.
Judging from the current geological data, this anomaly zone extends 500 meters along the strike, and the copper ore body may be a new copper mine.
"The surface of the ore is nearly 35 meters, with a copper grade of 4.5%. The ore is massive, and geophysical exploration shows that there are multiple layers of ore bodies. What is important now is that we can have a copper deposit similar to Chile's in the Northern Cape for the first time, which is similar to Chile's Compared with copper mines with a grade of only 0.25%, the grades of these large open-pit copper mines of ours are between 2.5% and 4.5%," said company CEO Jan Nelson. The company believes that the ore body has not been penetrated at depth, and since only surface work has been done, the scale of this discovery is not small. At the same time, drilling has not yet begun in the deep zone and in three other anomaly zones, which are larger than the first anomaly zone. If the other three anomalies produce the same results, the new discovery could be comparable in size to a Chilean copper mine.
Copper360 went public in April last year and acquired assets such as the Rietberg copper mine through the acquisition of Okiep Copper Company. From 1937 to 1950, the Rietberg Copper Mine mined 138,700 tons of ore with a copper grade of 25.4%, making it the highest grade copper mine mined in the region.
At present, Ritterberg's total resources have increased from 25,275 tons in 2022 to 81,200 tons, an increase of 220%, of which the inferred resources are 60,800 tons.
