RE:It's Just a Waiting GameI am in this camp too. I think relatively few people understand what is going to happen in the near future as IVN becomes a diversified world leading mining company. The quality of everything is oustanding - deposits, exploration prospects, management and workforce, relationships with host countries.
Because I wanted to know more about the Mokopane feeder possibilities, I spent several days over the last 2 weeks reading about the Platreef deposit, the Flatreef ore body, the regional expressions of it all and the nature of the intrusive events and mineralogy/exploration techniques etc.
Some takeaways I got from that (aside from eye and brain strain) - and note that these are the excited opinions of a rank amateur:
There is definitive evidence (spectroscopy of mineral grains in thin sections from core etc) that liquid base metal sulfides were trickling down through the stratified (by chemical and physical processes in magma chamber) mineral crystal mush (hot plastic layered minerals) that came out of the feeder in repeated cycles of magma chamber activity - there are well understood data showing this. That layered crystal mush became the stratigraphic layers of the Northern limb of the Bushveld and it was almost certainly pumped out of the Mokopane feeder. After extensive exploration over many decades, there is no other known feature in the area that could have supplied it. The dense liquid metal sulfides are known to trickle down and accumulate in hydrodynamic traps in the basement terrain. Think of geologic scale hollows, flow direction changes etc. These traps can form economically significant NiS deposits (e.g. Voisey's Bay is THE type example, notably discovered by Friedland's team). This is one type of target IVN is looking for, maybe the main one.
So the questions and answers for me are:
(i) Did the largest instrusive igneous complex in the world have a feeder zone that contained adequate volumes of metal sulfides to potentially fill available hydrodynamic traps. Surely - there is no doubt.
(ii) Do Ivanhoe exploration geologists and geophysicists understand how to search for these. Unequivocally - they have unparalleled experience from the discovery and subsequent definition of the Flatreef, including and especially the gravity measurements. This is how they discovered Zone 4 of Flatreef. Look at the initial gravity map Ivanhoe provided from the Mokopane feeder, and be certain they have far more detailed maps we have not seen, and have targets lined up for drilling. Through their CGI colleagues, they have access to some of the world's best geophysics data processing.
(iii) Will they find economically signifcant ore bodies on their new exploration licenses? Probably, in my opinion.