Nova Minerals has discovered the thickest gold-bearing quartz veins to date in its initial exploration program at the Wombat prospect with grades up to 24.2 grams per tonne.

Wombat is part of Nova’s flagship Estelle gold project located 177km northwest of Anchorage, Alaska’s major city.

Estelle sits near the eastern end of the Tintina gold belt that stretches westward from Alaska over the Canadian border and through most of the Yukon.

More than 200 million ounces of hard rock gold resources have been documented within the Tintina belt over the past decade.

It contains “untold millions of ounces” of historic placer gold, Nova said in one presentation.

New gold anomaly

Field observations and assay results from exploration surface samples at Wombat have confirmed the presence of a new gold anomaly with a strike length up to 1km.

Surface sampling traverses have unearthed massive gold-bearing quartz veins, some up to 4m thick.

Apart from gold assays up to 24.2g/t, five samples returned copper with the top grade coming in at 6.1%.

Final results from the recent airborne magnetic survey are still pending.

Wombat ‘viable’

Nova’s head of exploration Hans Hoffman said gold grades are better in the veins outcropping on the southern side of the ridge.

“Given the size and frequency of these large veins, we feel Wombat can be developed into a viable drill target to further feed into the project’s pipeline of developing gold prospects,” he added.

Chief executive officer Christopher Gerteisen said the Wombat discovery further highlights the massive exploration upside across the Estelle project area.

“We are beginning to recognise the multi-element potential within numerous prospects across Estelle including antimony, copper, silver and certain critical elements.”

Mr Gerteisen also noted that Wombat adds to the more than 20 known prospects the company has already identified at Estelle.

Field crews collected a total of 52 rock samples at Wombat, 16 of which returned greater than 1.0g/t gold.