ELA7077 & ELA7119 - Moolook — Three Magnetic Bodies Nobody Has Drilled, and the Water Bore That Says Why They Should Be

The Moolook Project, far western NSW, 180 km north of Broken Hill. Three untested magnetic bodies sit on a single basin-bounding structure — the terrane boundary between the Curnamona margin and the Bancannia Trough — with a mineralised water bore on the same structure between them. Base: GSNSW magnetics.

The one-sentence case

Three large magnetic bodies sit on a basin-bounding fault under about 500 m of cover, and the only hole ever drilled on that fault — a government water bore, by accident — hit lead–zinc–silver sulphides with a critical-metal signature.

Why nobody has tested them

The Koonenberry Belt has been a recognised magmatic nickel–copper province since Inco drilled Ni–Cu sulphides at Mt Arrowsmith East in 2005–09. Carpentaria followed at Packsaddle. S2 Resources — the Nova discovery team — has held 143 km of the belt since 2023. All of it is 46–83 km east of Moolook, in outcrop or shallow cover. S2's own tenure statement says it excludes ground under more than about 100 m of post-Carboniferous cover.

Moolook is the buried western end of the same belt. The three bodies here lie under roughly 500 m. Every company that ever held this ground — WMC in 1976, Mobil in 1980, BHP in 1991 — had left before anyone was looking for nickel. No drillhole, title or survey has ever targeted the bodies. They were screened out by a cover-depth rule. They were never assessed.

GSNSW total magnetic intensity (reduced to pole) with the application outline. All three bodies persist when the field is upward-continued 500 m — large or deep sources, not artefacts of the cover. The textured magnetics to the south-west are the Curnamona margin; the bland low to the north-east is the trough.

What the water bore proves

In 2009 the Geological Survey deepened a stock bore for stratigraphy and cored the last 3 m. It came up with Neoproterozoic black shale cut by quartz–carbonate veins and hydraulic breccia carrying galena and sphalerite: up to 5,055 ppm Pb, 7,440 ppm Zn, 24.8 g/t Ag, 21 ppm Sn and 1.9 ppm In across narrow spot samples. Galena lead isotopes are clearly post-Proterozoic — a structurally controlled system younger than, and unlike, Broken Hill. Nobody in the district had been looking for that either.

The bore is not the target. Nobody drills 450 m of cover to twin a 3 m core-tail, and we don't propose to. What it establishes is that the structure the three bodies sit on carries metal, and that the metal is of a type the district's explorers weren't searching for.

Certified multi-element results for the three core-tail samples (2010, partial digest, log scale). The uppermost sample is barren; lead peaks in G09/43 and zinc in G09/44, with silver, cadmium, tin and indium elevated across the mineralised interval. Historical, unverified — and the first thing Phase 0 re-tests.

What the bodies might be — and the twist in the gravity

The Survey maps them as Palaeozoic mafic intrusions and possible diatremes, from magnetics alone. The belt model says mafic–ultramafic intrusions with magmatic Ni–Cu–PGE sulphide. But the open-file gravity puts all three bodies on local lows, not highs. A magnetic high on a gravity low is not a dense gabbro. It is a serpentinised ultramafic — which keeps the nickel case alive — or a magnetite-bearing felsic intrusion, which fits the tin–indium chemistry of the bore rather well and would make the bodies the engine of the polymetallic system rather than the ore. Or a pipe. One ground gravity survey tells them apart.

GSNSW sediment-thickness model. The 500 m contour runs along the south-western edge of the application and through the water bore (442 m), then the basement drops to 2,000 m+ into the trough. The bodies sit on the up-thrown shoulder — drillable on their south-western sides, and the deep side is where any relinquishment starts.

What the first A$100,000 answers

How deep each body is (depth-to-source inversion, constrained by the basement surface). Whether the gravity lows are real (ground gravity). Whether the bore's sulphide assemblage and indium tenor survive a modern four-acid re-assay of the archived core. All three on existing data and core already in the government library, before any hole is considered. If the sources model at 1,500 m, we walk away having spent almost nothing. If they model at 500 m and dense, there is a drill-ready target on a mineralised structure at the buried end of an active nickel belt, and no one else holds it.

Next Steps

The 20-page technical synthesis — evidence hierarchy, per-target assessment, staged programme with decision gates, verification workstream — is available under NDA.

Check it yourself: MinView, Cobham Lake 1:250,000 — TMI RTP, 1VD upward-continued 500 m, ground Bouguer 1VD, sediment thickness. DIGS R00036180, R00029985, R00029820. S2 Resources ASX announcement, 23 October 2023, Table 1.

No JORC (2012) Mineral Resource, Ore Reserve or Exploration Target is declared or implied. Historical results are compiled from GSNSW open-file (DIGS) and MinView records, have not been verified by a Competent Person, and are provided for context only. The magnetic bodies are undrilled geophysical interpretations; their positions, sizes and cover depths are indicative and from regional models. Third-party Koonenberry Belt intercepts are as reported by S2 Resources Ltd from historical data.