Gidyea Creek

The Gidyea Creek Project tenure is located within the highly prospective Leichhardt River Fault Trough (LRFT), part of the Western Succession of the Mount Isa Basin. The Western Succession has a long history of Uranium exploration (over 50 years) and is associated with over 100 recorded uranium occurrences hosted within the Paleoproterozoic metasediments and mafic volcanic rocks (Polito et al., 2007) that belong to the Eastern Creek Volcanics (ECV).

The majority of known uranium occurrences in the ECV occur to the east by the Gorge Creek Fault and the Quilalar Fault Zone, to the north by the Crystal Creek Fault, to the west by the eastern margin of the Sybella Granite and the Twenty-nine Mile Fault and to the south by a zone coincident with the Mount Isa township (Polito et al, 2007). The mineral occurrences are observed as ironstone gossans some associated with small historic uranium workings, generally co-incident with large radiometric, magnetic and geochemical anomalies. The most significant of these occurrences is the Valhalla group of deposits (Valhalla, Odin, Skal) which occur just to the south of the Gidyea Creek Tenement boundary.

The Valhalla deposit is an epigenetic, hydrothermal, structurally controlled and albitite-hosted deposit of uranium. It is located within a NNW-striking sequence of intercalated metabasalt, laminated meta-shales and meta-siltstone units of the Eastern Creek Volcanics, which form a thick rift/sag sequence within the Leichhardt River Domain of the Mount Isa western succession (Cover Sequence 2) thought to have occurred between 1740 and 1680 Ma within the latest Paleoproterozoic. The Valhalla and Skal mineralisation are hosted by hematite-magnetite–carbonate breccias associated with a zone of intense mylonitic/cataclastic shearing and hydraulic brecciation.

The presence of significant zones of uranium and copper mineralisation, the proximity to the regional Mt Isa Fault zone, the proximity to granite intrusives and the mineralogy of the known deposits have been taken to imply that the mineralisation has an IOCG association (Hitzman and Valenta, 2005), however others hypothesize that the uranium deposits are metamorphosed equivalents of Proterozoic unconformity-type uranium deposits (Gregory et al, 2005).

The primary exploration target at Gidyea Creek is potential uranium occurrences with the ECV sequences which extend through the Gidyea Creek project tenure. Initial exploration activity will consist of data integration and review, in conjunction with development and refinement of the mineralization models to define first-order targets within the project tenure.