Hot Maden - Turkish delight or terror

Mariana Resources have been announcing some great intercepts from their Hot Maden project in Turkey, so I was intrigued to see a) how good the project really is and; b) what potential is there to expand the resources and c) are there more high grade deposits to be found?

Summary (the TL:DR Version)

• Initial resources outlined a small, but very high grade deposit
• Majority (>60%) of the Gold is in a small, ultra-high grade zone.
• Follow-up drilling appears to have closed off the deposit.
• Recently announced intercept in hole 053 (40m @ 9g/t Au) needs follow-up
• Exploration around deposit hints at additional 
• Drilling has focused in an 800m long core of a 4km regional alteration trend.
• good potential to find additional deposits
• Is there a second, unexplored alteration zone cropping out in the NW of the project?

Here are the initial resources (Sept 2015)

If you look at the table, 60% of the gold is in the Main Zone UHG (Ultra High Grade). Accurately defining this zone will be key for the deposit.

The initial resources were defined from just 17 drill-holes, and since then Mariana and their JV partner Lidya. it has a central A-Cu zone with a Zn rich halo.

Gold: Red arrow = trend of high grade zone

Copper: Red Arrow = trend of high grade zone

Zinc: moderate/low grade zone halo around the Cu-Au core

If you want to look at this data in 3D, you can download the Leapfrog viewer files from here (link).


When we bring in all the data from all 53 drill-holes that have been announced:

Comparison of my 1 g/t Au grade shells from all DH (blue) and the first 17 DH (red)

 The majority of the new drilling has focused on:

• Infill = better defining the high grade zone
• Resource expansion.
• Trying to link the 2 resource areas
• Exploring for the extension of mineralisation along strike and to depth in the main zone

The drilling has been partially successful. The high grade zone is now better defined and from initial review appears to be similar sized or slightly larger than initially calculated. There are several high grade intercepts (e.g. DH 052 and 053) that need followed up.
I would guess that in an updated resource we would see a moderate increase as drilling has essentially defined mineralisation limits, and outside of this most drill-holes have hit narrow zones of moderate grade within a low-grade halo.

Again, you can find all this data in 3D here (link).


But it isn't all doom and gloom, when you take all of the data and put it all together, I pulled all the soil maps from the technical report, the sections and satellite imagery from Google Earth, the project area looks very exciting.

Drilling has focused on exploring the large (900m x 250m) gold, copper and Zinc soil anomalies, and has explored them systematically with great results.

Current resources = black outline; drill-holes = white circles.

The area to the south looks very interesting!

 When we look regionally, we see that drilling (and maybe exploration in general)  has only focused on a small (800m) portion of a much larger alteration zone.

This is understandable, this is where most of the historic mining has occurred, but there may be multiple deposits along this trend and it would be nice to see Mariana/Lidya exploring the rest of this trend. In Google Earth there appears to be a second, smaller alteration zone to the NW of the main trend, could there be anything interesting here?

Looking at the topography, maybe a regional stream sediment sampling program will identify areas of interest for future exploration?

The 3D view of the regional and drilling data can be found here (link)