Glass Earth Gold steps up drilling across New Zealand

PERTH, WESTERN AUSTRALIA — Wellington-based junior Glass Earth Gold (GEL-V, GELGF-O) is among New Zealand’s most active explorers and probably the only one with drilling campaigns on both the North and South Islands.

Simon Henderson, Glass Earth’s chief executive, says that diamond drilling is progressing at Muirs Reef, where there are old workings and targets drilled by others in the 1990s that showed up high-grade epithermal gold-silver.

Muirs Reef is south of the city of Tauranga on the North Island, and relatively close to Newmont Mining’s (NMC-T, NEM-N) Waihi gold mining operations.

Glass Earth has a series of joint ventures with Newmont — New Zealand’s biggest spender with a budget of around NZ$8 million ($6 million) — on licences surrounding the major’s Waihi mining tenements. The partnership is completing a drilling program on a prospect 10 km northwest of Waihi, where, at the turn of the 20th century, about 110,000 oz. gold was recovered. Newmont is earning a 65% interest in Glass Earth’s licences in the Waihi district.

Last year Glass Earth established an exploration office in Dunedin, in Otago province, in the deep south of the South Island. It has just completed a two-hole program on its Sparrowhawk prospect there and is now preparing to drill at Gold and Pine near Lawrence.

This latter target may be the source of 1.5 million oz. gold recovered in the late 1800s from the Gabriel’s Gully region — perhaps New Zealand’s greatest historic alluvial field.

Following the departure of St Andrew Goldfields (SAS-T, SASXF-O) as a major shareholder last year, Glass Earth now has a stronger New Zealand shareholding, and has listed on the New Zealand Stock Exchange.