Geological and Structural Setting

The Ninden Hill Project comprises Exploration Licence 20/536 which was granted on 4 June 2009. The tenement covers approximately 97.5km² of the Meekatharra-Wydgee greenstone belt, 25km north of Cue. E20/536 is dominantly underlain by a north-south striking package of mafic volcanic rocks, dolerite and gabbroic sills. Oval, post-tectonic granitoids occupy the northeast and southwest corners of the tenement.  Networks of east-northeast trending Proterozoic dolerite dykes traverse the area. A thick felsic volcanic unit has been interpreted across the northwest corner of the tenement, however, historic drilling appears to indicate this as mafic volcanics.  The volcanic package is described as Gabanintha Formation within the Luke Creek Group and more recently described as Meekatharra Formation within the Polelle Group. The volcanic sequence has been intruded by at least one mafic-ultramafic layered intrusive sill.

The volcanic package at Ninden Hill is a northern continuation of the mafic volcanic sequence that contains the Great Fingall dolerite, which hosts gold mineralisation at the Golden Crown and Great Fingall deposits to the south. The Golden Crown and Great Fingall lode gold deposits are two of a number of NW-SE to N-S trending quartz vein networks hosted by the steeply dipping, 500m thick differentiated Great Fingall dolerite sill and adjacent graphitic shale in the Day Dawn district.

Gold Mineralisation and Planned Exploration

Previous exploration in the 1990s mapped a thick differentiated sill across the eastern half of the area, varying from ultramafic cumulate at the base to mafic cumulate at the top. The upper part of the sill was recognised as having good potential for hosting auriferous quartz veins associated with dilational brittle fracturing of the granophyric horizon. In 1995, BLEG soil sampling on a 200m x 500m grid across the sill was undertaken and located a 1.2km long >6ppb Au anomaly. Subsequent drilling along a NE-SW magnetic anomaly across the northwestern portion of the tenement intersected coarse to medium grained dolerite beneath the magnetic high, with an intermediate volcanic and basalt to the west. Low level gold anomalism is associated with the sheared basalts. A potential magnetic ultramafic base to the dolerite was not encountered in this limited drilling program (only 3 holes exceeded 100m depth), and consequently the magnetic anomaly remains unexplained. No exploration has been conducted since.

Alchemy’s exploration focus within the Ninden Hill Project is for lode-gold mineralisation hosted within a Great Fingall-equivalent differentiated dolerite sill. Alchemy has recently acquired reprocessed aeromagnetic data and will undertake a structural interpretation in conjunction with geological mapping and soil and rock geochemical sampling in 2010 and model the data in the Murchison 3D model to define drill targets.