Lake Victoria Mining has purchased a mobile auger drill rig to provide soil sampling services over “mbuga” covered areas of its gold projects in the Lake Victoria Greenstone Gold Belt of Tanzania. Dr. Roger Newell, Chairman of Lake Victoria: “The addition of the auger rig as a cost effective exploration tool will help us rapidly evaluate our mbuga covered targets without having to rely on the availability and expensive commercial RAB rigs during this early stage of exploration. Since a large proportion of the land mass in the Lake Victoria Gold District is covered by mbuga the chances of making a new gold discovery in areas of our existing licenses is very good. [We are] committed to ensure that no stone is left unturned in the quest for targets beneath the mbuga.
Much of the low-lying areas, including the drainages around Lake Victoria, in the northern part of Tanzania, are covered by a blanket of dark grey clays known as Black Cotton Soil or locally as mbuga clays. These clays, believed to be lacustrine sediments derived from periodic flooding of Lake Victoria, have masked the underlying land surface, covering both in-situ soils and rock outcrops and allowing little to no chemical dispersion from the underlying substrate to pass through to the surface. Depths of the mbuga vary between a few centimetres to in excess of 10 m thick. Exploration for mineral deposits in mbuga covered areas therefore becomes difficult, time consuming and costly as it generally requires the scheduling and contracting of a RAB drilling program.
Exploration over these mbuga covered areas is largely done by various geophysical techniques conducted by the company’s own geophysical teams and equipment. Upon interpretation of the collected geophysical data, this results in the mapping out of the geophysical properties of the underlying rock sequences and the structural imprint in order to interpret potential gold targets. Follow up drilling is required to test these targets to confirm mineralisation.
Using the recently acquired auger drill rig the company intends to test the geophysical targets that have already been interpreted, across many of the mbuga covered project areas, including but not limited to the Suguti, Murangi, Kinyambwiga, Kalemela and the Tarime licenses in the Lake Victoria District. The auger rig has the capability to drill holes to depths in excess of 20 m; sufficient to reach below the mbuga cover. Using systematic sampling programs and the specially designed sampling tool Lake Victoria will sample the soil/saprock interface beneath the mbuga at the bottom of each drill hole.
The auger rig has recently arrived in the country and has been deployed in testing the immediate strike extensions of the subsurface Kanunga 1 gold vein at the Kinyambwiga Prospect. A number of additional north-south sample traverses are planned further east along strike of the Kanunga 1 vein to validate previously reported soil anomalies.
The drill rig will the move onto the Suguti Project where a program has been planned to trace a number of northeast-southwest trending soil and gradient IP anomalies beneath the mbuga in the vicinity of the major north-west striking Suguti Fault.
The company intends to have the new auger drill constantly deployed to complete the testing of all existing geophysical targets that lie below mbuga covering.
