News

June 23, 2008

Stratex International Mops Up The Miocene

By Rob Davies

You can tell quickly tell, even in a phone conversation, when a geologist really believes in his exploration programme, as opposed to one who is just going through the motions. And you don’t need to spend long on the phone with Bob Foster, chief executive of Stratex International to know that he falls very definitely into the first camp. Minews called just to clarify the state of play on the company’s myriad of gold exploration targets in Turkey and within no time at all Bob was expounding at length on the importance of the 10 million year old Miocene volcanics compared with the younger volcanics dating back a mere three million years.

The difference is not semantic because the older rocks are auriferous and the younger ones are not. But while it is easy to make that distinction on the phone, differentiating them on the ground is nothing like as simple. No one knows this better the Bahri Yildiz, the company’s general manager. He’s the man who jumped out of his car in a new road cutting, and made the initial discovery at Inlice. He spent ten years with the Turkish Geological Survey where the difference between the two sets of...