The Tropicana Gold Project area lies east of a northeast trending magnetic feature, interpreted to be the major tectonic suture between the Yilgarn Craton and the Proterozoic Albany-Fraser Orogen that extends over 700km. The gold deposit is hosted in Archaean gneissic metamorphic rocks (ca. 2,640Ma) with cover sequences generally 10 to 30m thick resulting in the mineral deposit not being exposed at surface.

The 5km long strike of gold mineralisation at Tropicana is subdivided into five shear offset zones from north to south – Boston Shaker, Tropicana, Havana, Havana Deeps, and Havana South. The mineralised corridor is ~1.2km wide and up to 1.5km down dip to the current deepest drill intercepts. Within each zone the gold mineralisation trends north to northeast. Gold is concentrated in ~2m to ~50m thick subparallel layers within the ‘favourable horizon’ which comprises quartz-feldspar gneiss units.

Together, the Tropicana, Havana, Havana South and Boston Shaker deposits define a northeast trending mineralised corridor, approximately 1.2km wide and 5km long that has been tested to a vertical depth of more than 1,200m. The Mineral Resource remains open down-dip from the Tropicana, Havana and Boston Shaker deposits and has the potential to be extended to the north and south. Neither the immediate metamorphic host rocks nor the mineralised zones are exposed at surface due to the presence of widespread younger cover sequences.

The Tropicana area is ........

Open Pit
The Open Pits at Tropicana are conventional load and haul operations. Loading is by combination of face shovels, and excavators, and haulage carried out with a fleet of rigid body haul trucks. Smaller class excavators are used for batter scaling operations and ancillary works. A fleet of loaders service the Run of Mine (ROM) stockpile requirements for ore feed to crusher, and to rehandle underground ore material from in-pit stockpile locations to ROM.

The mined ore material is hauled by the open pit mining fleet to the ROM stockpile pad and the crusher. The waste material mined is transported to a combination of external waste dumps and internal in-pit waste dumps.

Underground
The underground mine is designed using conventional mechanized mining methods. Development uses a jumbo for drill and blest excavations, as well as installing ground support. Productions activities are based around variations of top-down longhole stoping methods, depending on the width of the orebody, with ore pillars left in situ between stopes to reduce waste dilution and ensure long term regional stability.

Areas with an orebody width of less than 20 metres are designed as longitudinal longhole sublevel open stoping, retreating along strike to the cross-cut. Areas with a width greater than 20 metres are designed as transverse longhole stoping, employing multiple ore drives across the stope width connected with cross-cut drives perpendicular to the s ........

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