Chesterfield Resources reported further assay results from its 2021 diamond drilling at its Troodos West project in Cyprus. Not only has the drilling significantly enhanced the prospectivity at three target areas, Orchard, Evlim and Evlim South, but it has also established a 12km geological trend that is now considered key to controlling several mineralised systems, with the potential for further discoveries along the structure. The "Westline Trend" will now be the focus of the company's 2022 exploration campaign that is to commence very shortly.

It is noteworthy that the two other main explorers on the island, Caerus Resources and Venus Minerals have also had surprisingly gold-rich encounters, with Venus announcing results just last week. On the Westline Trend, it is quite possible that the gold zones are indicating that there are proximal copper rich deposits nearby. Copper rich zones in Cyprus VMS systems tend to be smaller and more highly concentrated, while the gold zones have a much broader footprint, and so encountered more readily.

The zone discovered at Orchard, for example, was polymetallic, with particularly strong shows of gold and zinc, but copper and silver were also present. However, the gold and silver encounters are highly promising in their own right. The drilling at Orchard was testing coincident geochemical and geophysical anomalies, obtained from the 2021 gravity and AMT surveys, adjacent to a large, regional structure.

A single diamond drill hole, in 2018, had targeted the same structure and intercepted encouraging alteration but with additional geophysics it was determined that this drill hole may have stopped short of testing a deeper zone of mineralisation. With increased targeting confidence coming from the 2021 geophysical campaigns, drill hole 21OR01 was designed to test deeper and intercepted three separate gold-rich polymetallic mineralised zones, including from 185.50m depth a 5.70m thick zone of semi-massive sulphides grading 2.27g/t Au, 6.32g/t Ag 0.42% Cu, 5.99% Zn within a broader 24.05m thick mineralised interval. The mineralisation in 21OR01 consists of semi-massive sulphides hosted by an intensely quartz-carbonate-clay altered pillow basalt breccia and is interpreted to be a stratabound zone of mineralisation with potential for significant extensions.

Follow-up work on the many collected data sets is currently being undertaken to identify potential extensions of this gold-rich polymetallic mineralisation. Drilling at the Evlim South and Evlim target followed on from the encouraging gold results in the 2020 and 2018 diamond drilling. A significant focus was placed on targeting extensions to this known gold mineralisation.

The drilling stepped out to the west, south and southwest and identified that the historic near surface gold mineralisation from previous programmes continued at depth in these directions. Mineralisation is associated with polymetallic quartz veining and zones of silica clay alteration within pillow basalts. The addition of these latest encouraging drill results provides further strong evidence of a significant gold-rich polymetallic mineralised trend of over 12km extending from the historic Limni mine in the northwest, through the Evlim and Orchard target areas, to the Westline target area in the southeast.

An extensive 2022 field work programme is being designed to further test this underexplored mineralised trend in addition to further drill-testing of the gold-rich polymetallic mineralised zones at Orchard and Westline. These results coupled with the encouraging results from the Westline target have provided several exciting targets for follow up field work and diamond drilling in 2022. In particular, it is believed that these thick gold-rich polymetallic sulphide zones intercepted at Westline and now Orchard are lateral gold-rich zones that can transition into copper-zinc-gold-silver rich cores of VMS-style sulphide deposits such as found at the Skouriotissa and Mavrovouni mines in Cyprus.

The 2022 exploration programme will be focused on defining and drill-testing the most prospective massive sulphide targets in the vicinity of these gold-rich polymetallic zones at Westline and Orchard.