World’s Latest High-Grade Gold Discovery – A Story About Good Luck or Good Science?

Gold exploration situations date back thousands of years, and history has taught that while ideas and stories are plentiful, discovery is rare. In fact, part of the reason gold has maintained value throughout many generations is that it is so difficult to find.

Recently, a small Canadian-based company has announced what seems to be the highest-grade discovery in the world so far in these early days of 2024, setting the bar high for other companies in the months ahead. The shallow intercept, which graded 8m at 106 g/t Gold, 5m at 166 g/t Gold, and 2m at 413 g/t Gold starting at 95m, leads to a discussion about whether a hole like this is a result of good luck or good science.

While it’s easy to write this big new discovery off as simply good luck, it is interesting to note that some members of the Great Pacific team were also involved in a situation in recent years that was ultimately named Best Global Discovery and helped a small junior company grow into a multi-billion-dollar mining entity.

Great Pacific CEO Bryan Slusarchuk, no stranger to exploration success, weighs in, “It would be easy to classify this discovery simply as good luck, but I think that explanation doesn’t take into account all of the science that went into deciding where this hole would be drilled. Rex Motton, our COO, and his team on the ground in Australia have done a lot of hard work over the past few years and based on the results of that work decided where to drill this hole. They drilled a single hole into what we call the Comet prospect in 2023 and that hole ended up delivering these amazingly high-grade results.”

Slusarchuk continued, “Exploration is high risk, and there is still a lot of work to be done to follow up on the discovery to ultimately figure out what it will look like, but kudos go to the geologists whose efforts led to this early success.”

Slusarchuk knows what the power of discovery is all about. In 2014, he and a few friends founded a company called K92 Mining Inc., and paid Barrick Gold which was then the largest gold operator in the world $2 million up front with a promise of some future payments that were success dependent. That company, based on excellent execution by the current CEO John Lewins and a discovery called Kora North, has ended up trading at a $2 billion market capitalization and is still growing their resource and production profile.

Slusarchuk notes, “K92 was financially life-changing for a lot of early speculators. After the Kora North discovery hole, everything changed on that project. It is way too early to tell if we are on the same trajectory with Great Pacific, but I feel blessed to have another discovery starting to take shape. I’m a finance guy by way of background and can’t take credit for the good science on the ground. I can help make sure we finance these drill shots around the world and give speculators exposure to potential discovery but ultimately, the drill bit decides what works and what doesn’t. Great Pacific has a tiny market capitalization, and the Comet situation will attract some attention going forward.”

Great Pacific trades on the TSX Venture Exchange in Canada with the symbol GPAC and in the United States on the OTC as FSXLF. 

Exploration comes with a lot of potential risks. Maybe both good luck and good science are needed to overcome that inherent fact in this industry.