The Hamdah prospect is a 1.5-km2 area that includes ancient mine workings 15 km southeast of Hamdah in the southern Arabian Shield. The workings cluster at a gently dipping thrust contact between serpentinite (above) and hornblende schist (below) exposed in a window within the serpentinite. Aplite sills intrude the contact, and gold concentrations occur just above or below it.
The ancient mine dumps cover >100,000 m2 of the prospect and are estimated to be 1.5 to 1.8 m thick. They contain nearly 181,000 metric tons of material at an average grade of 4.5 g/t gold, thus having an estimated total gold content of 831 kg, or 26,726 Troy oz. Almost 100 percent of the contained gold is recoverable by cyanide acid leaching.
Eleven new diamond-drill holes were completed to supplement information from 12 drill holes completed during an earlier drilling program, in order to enable more detailed evaluation of the prospect. The drill holes are grouped in the northeast, southeast, southwest, and west quadrants of the prospect. In the northeast quadrant, where 9 drill holes intersect gold at shallow (
