EL 29227 First and final report for year ending 26 November 2013 Napperby Creek Project

Abstract

EL 29227 (Napperby Creek Project) was granted to Arafura Resources Limited (Arafura) on the 27 November 2012. The tenement was acquired to test the prospectivity of the region for rare earth element (REE) mineralisation and in particular, to follow up historic work undertaken by Arafura on EL 23571 (Reynolds Range Project) of which EL 29227 comprises a small part. A heavy mineral concentrate (HMC) stream sediment survey undertaken by Arafura in 2009 identified two samples of interest in the project area. The first had anomalous REE values and the second had an interesting elemental ratio of Zr to Nb which could indicate a carbonatitic or alkaline intrusive source. The region neighbouring and including the Napperby Creek Project has been historically explored for gold, uranium, base metals, tungsten, diamonds and recently REEs. The geology of the project area is dominated by the Reynolds Range Group, a Palaeoproterozoic package of metapelites, metapsammites, marbles, dolomites and calc-silicate rocks. This package forms a roughly NW-SE trending synform through the project area and is unconformably bounded by the Palaeoproterozoic Yaningidjara Orthogneiss in the north east and intruded by the Palaeoproterozoic granitic Napperby Gneiss in the southwest. First year investigations on EL 29227 involved a desktop study and a short field program comprising collection of two -2mm 50kg HMC stream sediment samples and two representative carbonate rock chip samples collected for acid neutralisation test work. The HMC samples were assayed for REEs along with a suite of other important elements and one of the HMC samples was subsequently selected for QEMSCAN (Quantitative Evaluation of Minerals by Scanning Electron Microscopy) to identify the REE-bearing and indicator heavy minerals. The results of the assay and QEMSCAN indicated that the area is not prospective for economic REE mineralisation and hence Arafura has surrendered EL 29227.