Igurubi

Project Summary

The Igurubi project is located in the eastern part of the Nzega Greenstone Belt of the Lake Victoria Goldfields, about 60km east of the Golden Pride Mine. The southern part of the area hosts a number of richly mineralised quartz reefs, extending over at least 6km African Eagle has conducted surface surveys and investigated several of the veins by drilling. Deposit modelling from the drill results indicates a significant gold endowment.

Licences

The project comprises three prospecting licences totalling 111km², in which African Eagle has a current 75% interest. Several Primary Mining Licences exist within the area, and the Company has exploration agreements covering the majority of these.

Geology

Most of the licence areas are covered by lake-bed sediments deposited during wetter climatic periods during the ice ages, but granite and greenstone rocks outcrop in much of the southern part of the project area. The contact between these lithologies is sheared and the granite, which is strongly altered, contains a suite of northwest trending gold-bearing quartz veins. The main gold zone contains at least three mineralised structures, extending over a strike length of at least 5.5km and open at both ends. African Eagle has investigated these structures by drilling and parts of them support artisanal gold workings.

The northern part of the area, though largely concealed by lake sediments, is believed to be largely underlain by greenstones: inliers of Banded Iron Formation crop out through the sediments.

The area attracted African Eagle’s attention because of its artisan mines and because the gold shows an association with copper, like that seen at Barrick Gold’s Bulyanhulu and Buswagi mines in Tanzania. The presence of gold veins in altered porphyritic granite also has echoes of Buswagi.

Current Status

African Eagle has compiled and synthesised a good deal of survey data from previous explorers and completed extensive follow up geophysical, geochemical and geological mapping of its own. The Company has also drilled 76 reverse circulation (RC) and 166 air core (AC) holes for a total of 15,574m, targeting the known gold reefs. Of these, 43 RC holes and 33 AC holes intersected gold mineralisation of 0.5 g/t or greater over 3m or more. Intersections include:

Hole no	From (m)	Section (m)	Grade (g/t)
IGRC - 5	60	3	6.81
IGRC - 12	69	4	14.21
IGRC - 20	109	6	7.33
IGRC - 26	31	6	7.03
IGRC - 36	82	3	6.25

African Eagle’s drilling has shown that the gold mineralisation extends beneath the lake sediments south from the known structures.

In early 2009, African Eagle’s geologists made an “in-house” estimate of the potential size of the deposit, by polygonal deposit modelling using Micromine software. They constructed 54 sections along the principal mineralised vein set and then interpolated the outlines of the “ore shells” along strike between the sections and extrapolated them down dip to 100 -150m depth. The table below gives the results obtained using a 1g/t gold lower cut-off and a 15g/t “top cut” of high grade intercepts. The estimate proved generally robust when tested using alternative cut-off and top-cut values.

Volume	SG	Tonnage	Grade g/t	Ounces
2,933,242	2.7	7,919,754	2.76	701,575

These results do not constitute a resource conforming to the JORC code for reporting of mineral resources and reserves, because the drilling is relatively widely spaced and continuity of the mineralisation could not be established with full confidence on some sections. Nonetheless, the result indicates that the area has a significant gold endowment and would be very likely to reward further exploration.

Future Programme

A number of reefs and structures remain to be fully investigated, including:

• A 5km zone along the interpreted sheared granite greenstone contact parallel and to the north-east of the known mineralisation, which may host “blind” gold zones masked by silcrete.
• The southeast extension of the main mineralised zone beneath Quaternary lake sediments.
• The northwest extension of the main reef zone, where reconnaissance RC drilling returned intersections of 7.33g/t over 6m and 4.85g/t over 3m.
• A soil geochemical target 1 km west of the main reefs, where rock chip sampling by African Eagle returned values up to 27.33 g/t gold and artisanal workers have previously mined gold.

In April 2010, the Company agreed terms with Australian explorer Peak Resources Ltd for Peak to acquire its 75% interest in the Igurubi Project. Under the agreement, Peak will issue shares in consideration for the interest, on achievement of agreed milestones, in a transaction that values the project at some Aus$ 4.4M (£2.6M). The disposal will enable African Eagle to conserve cash for its other projects, notably its flagship Dutwa nickel project.

 

Igurubi fact sheet - January 2008
(PDF - 231KB)