Commencement Of Drill Program At The Bellary Dome Project

VANCOUVER - Novo Resources Corp. announced the commencement of a reverse circulation (RC) drill program focussed on the orogenic gold Catia Prospect and the gold in conglomerate Edney’s Find Prospect at the Bellary Dome Project, South Pilbara, Western Australia.

Novo entered into an option agreement with Bellary Dome Pty Ltd in June 2020 to acquire the gold only rights on E47/3555. Bellary Dome Pty Ltd retains the rights to all other minerals and ownership of the tenement under the agreement.

Bellary is one of Novo’s priority target areas across its significant 10,500 sq km landholding in the Pilbara. This is an area of structural uplift along the southern margin of the Pilbara Craton where both historic and more recent explorers have identified significant gold targets. Field work carried out by Novo, combined with historical exploration reviews completed in 2020/2021, highlighted several gold targets, with Catia and Edney’s Find prioritized for drilling.

Catia is a structurally complex area, comprising sulphidic quartz veins hosted in highly foliated basalt and sedimentary rocks, and hosting a network of shallow and steep dipping gold-rich quartz veins within a regional west-northwest trending shear zone. Rock chips from reconnaissance mapping and sampling by Novo returned significant anomalous gold values, with peak results of 556 ppm Au and 117 ppm Au. Broad (km) scale carbonate, silica and sulphide alteration has also been identified across all stratigraphic units at Bellary.

Edney’s Find is a conglomerate-hosted gold occurrence that has been explored since the 1970s by multiple companies. The area has remnants of significant historical and recent prospector activity including dry-blowing spoils, historic pits and a small shaft. Previous work includes mapping, surface sampling, trenching, and drilling. The area is dominated by Bellary Formation sediments comprising arkosic sandstone, quartzite, shale, and conglomerate, shallowly overlying basement rocks. The conglomerate is clast supported with clast size varying from pebble to cobble size and zones of the conglomerate show disseminated buckshot pyrite, up to 10mm in diameter. A peak gold value from a trench rock chip sample by Novo in 2020 returned 36.4 ppm Au. Several short holes are planned in order to test the gold endowment of the conglomerate.