Galileo has a joint venture 67% interest in its key Fraser Range tenements with joint venture partner Mark Creasy. The Company is exploring for magmatic nickel-copper-cobalt deposits similar to the active Nova nickel mine.

The Fraser Range project covers exploration licences totalling 675km² in the Albany-Fraser Orogen. The Albany-Fraser Orogen is dominated by the northeast-trending Fraser Zone, a suite of high-grade metamorphic rocks that have a distinct geophysical signature in both aeromagnetic and gravity data. The Fraser Zone comprises mainly metagabbroic rocks interlayered with sheets of granitic gneisses.

Galileo’s Fraser Range tenure is located across two areas – the North Fraser Range and the South Fraser Range projects. The projects are well positioned within the nickel-copper bearing Fraser Range Zone, with the Nova Bollinger mine and Silver Knight deposit located between the two Galileo-controlled areas. The Mawson Deposit is further north along strike from Galileo’s North Fraser Range holding. The location also offers excellent access to infrastructure, with the Eyre highway traversing the South Fraser Range project while the Trans-Australia railway and road are adjacent to the North Fraser Range project.

Electromagnetic (EM) surveying is the primary tool used to explore for prospective sulphide zones at Galileo’s Fraser Range project. EM surveying involves placing a non-ground disturbing wire loop on the ground, passing a current through the loop, and measuring the response of the ground to the current. In this way conductive ground responses are detected which may be related to a number of causes including magmatic sulphides, graphitic sediments, and hyper saline ground water.  Modelling of EM data provides a source location of the EM response and those models which best fit the characteristics of potential sulphide mineralisation are selected for drill testing. 

The diagram below illustrates a theoretical EM survey over the top of a conductor located within a mafic-ultramafic intrusion.

Thompson (Canada) vs Fraser Range (Australia) 

The Fraser Range has been modelled as an underexplored analogue of the Thomson nickel belt in northern Manitoba, Canada. The Thompson belt has been well explored, containing world class nickel mining centres located on the edge of an Archean-aged mineral province – the same geological structural setting as seen at the Fraser range.

The Thompson Nickel Belt has yielded:

• More than 10 deposits over 100km of strike length
• Total known resources of 146Mt
• Over 50 years of mining and exploration

Meanwhile the Fraser Range nickel belt remains in its infancy, with:

• Two deposits with over 150km of prospective strike length
• Total combined pre-mining resources of just 19Mt at the Nova, Silver Knight and Mawson deposits
• Immature nickel belt with untapped potential