The Love Train: Part 2 Icarus,
You and 95% of this board are selling HOPE and DREAMS.... It's time you WAKE UP!!!
The results have clearly demonstrated there's no gold fines to make these nuggets a viable ore deposit. It's totally IMPOSSIBLE to build an effective resource model in a paleo-placer gold environment where a few nuggets occur in one area but are completely absent in an adjacent section. Without a disseminated gold component (fine grain) these nuggets are 100% worthless. This is the nature of fluvial gold systems. Why this so hard to understand is beyond me.
The several dozen nuggets they found were randomly deposited in an ancient paleo flood plain/ basin and literally mean jacksh*t to a large scale mining company. You need to be able to demonstrate grade over thickness (depth-m) and distance (length-km) to prove a viable resource. This is an impossible task with NO gold fines! Scooping up a bunch of conglomerate with the odd nugget in it is a fools game, the dilution from the waste rock makes the whole scenario a complete non-starter. Purdy's and the rest of the Pilbara are destined to become a mom and pop operation at best, but more likely they will be reclaimed by the weekend warriors armed with metal detectors.
Many processes over billions of years are at play here. My interpretation is that Meta-somatic alteration during/post orogenesis (likely 100's of kilometers away) produced in a meso/epithermal environment resulted in the formation of high grade gold in faults and fissures. Later during episodes of erosion via fluvial process the gold was transported into lower regions of Western Australia, or perhaps Australia still part of Gondwana at this time. These processes resulted in the formation of coarse grained sediments (boulders, cobble, gravel and sand) deep into the Pilbara flood plain that were later reworked and redistributed over 100's of millions of years via alluvial flooding of the lowland basin in accordance with transgressive/regressive sequences (rising and falling sea levels) reworking the entrained coarse sediment. During transgression fine sands/silt were deposited and reworked into the conglomerate strata a result of long-shore current deposition processes. Subsequent uplift from intrusive granite bodies followed by subsidence and further erosion with the later formation of the Mt Roe basalts (sub-aerial during transgression) and you can begin to appreciate the complexity of these conglomerates and why finding a few nuggets in this strata is really a meaningless exercise. It's nothing.
***In other words you absolutely NEED TO HAVE DISSEMINATED GOLD FINES in with these conglomerates or this is whole thing is a TOTAL BUST!!!
Now, please tell me how do you intend to map out these sporadically deposited nuggets across the Pilbara basin and claim an economic resource model? Industry professionals would love to see that... lol
In the mean time I suggest you start buying lotto tickets and get on board The Love Train!
https://youtu.be/QyT9jTW7MHc
bs