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Location
The Sefwi Belt is a 40-60km wide typical Birimian volcanic belt, striking 220 km in Ghana and extends SW to the coast in Côte d'Ivoire. It is located north of, and parallel to, the prolific Ashanti Gold Belt, which hosts many of Ghana's active producing gold mines.
Background
For the most part of the 20th Century, only the Bibiani Mine existed on this belt with an approximate total resource of 3 million ounces. The application and funding of exploration programs employing modern exploration methods in the mid 1990's to the present on the Sefwi Belt has significantly increased resources to over 25 million ounces of gold. Currently the Sefwi Belt hosts three centres of gold production. These include Newmont's world class Ahafo Mine, Redback's Chirano Mine and the historic Bibiani Mine, which is now owned by Central African Gold.
Geology
The Sefwi Belt is dominated by mafic volcanics, metasediments and intrusive granitoids. The belt is sandwiched between adjacent sedimentary basins (Sunyani Basin to the west and the Kumasi Basin to the east) and the shared margins are highly faulted and sheared. These northeast trending marginal faults are traceable along the full length of the belt. In addition, there are major prospective faults within the interior of the belt that splay off and link the marginal fault structures that are associated with gold mineralization. Late east-northeast trending crosscutting oblique lineaments are seen in regional data sets and are seen to be represented by similarly oriented structures at the deposit level which are also associated with gold mineralization.The overall structural fabric of the belt is NE.
Birim Goldfields was drawn to the potential of the region by the significant gold discoveries that led to the successful development of Newmont's world-class Ahafo Mine and Redback's Chirano Mine, both of which highlight the under appreciated exploration potential of this gold belt.
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