Nautilus Minerals has been granted 16 offshore exploration licences covering 77,552sqkm of territorial waters of the Kingdom of Tonga in the western Pacific Ocean.

A further 14 tenements covering 8267sqkm2 in the Exclusive Economic Zone of the Solomon Islands have also been granted, continuing the company's tenement holding in the highly prospective Woodlark Basin to the east of Papua New Guinea.

Nautilus now has about 119,950sqkm of granted tenements and about 250,110sqkm of tenement applications in the territorial waters and Exclusive Economic Zones of Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Solomon Islands, Fiji and New Zealand
Nautilus' CEO David Heydon says: "Following the success of our 2007 exploration program in Papua New Guinea with the discovery of new seafloor massive sulphide systems and the development of geophysics and drilling tools, Nautilus continues to build on its first mover advantage and to develop a pipeline of projects with its goal to have a resource inventory across the Western Pacific that can be aggregated with a mobile mining spread.

"The exploration licences granted in Tonga cover a strike of more than 900km of highly prospective geology known to contain seafloor massive sulphide (SMS) occurrences. The prospectivity of the granted exploration licences has been demonstrated by initial survey work by marine scientific research (MSR) groups from the USA, Japan, Korea, and Germany. These groups have identified at least 10 prospects where SMS accumulations have been observed.

"Surface sampling by these MSR groups over just five prospects returned average results of 22.7% zinc, 4.7% copper, 2.0 grams/tonne gold and 77 grams/tonne silver from 231 samples. The results are similar to our experience in PNG where MSR groups initially discovered a number of systems, with further work by Nautilus confirming the tenor of mineralization in these systems and rapidly discovering others." www.nautilusminerals.com