We Stand on a Hillside of Caribou Lichen and Know That Winter Is Coming. the Chill September

Blue ground: geologists decipher ancient clues to find diamonds in Canada's North. (Northwest Territories)(includes related articles on the Lac de Gras mine and industrial diamonds) ( Canadian Geographic ) Findlay, Jamieson; 01-11-1998

We stand on a hillside of caribou lichen and know that winter is coming. The chill September

wind of the Barren Ground blows over the tundra of autumn yellows and crab-apple reds. It

buffets the nearby geologists' drill shack and the fresh core of glistening rock on the ground,

fanning it dull and dry under the zinc-grey sky. By our feet are sample holes, dug by geologists

who are wondering if they can get in another week of work before the snow flies. This is the

visible landscape here at Munn Lake in the Northwest Territories, but the geologists - being

geologists - are mainly interested in the bed of secrets beneath the tundra. They are hunting

diamonds for the Toronto-based company SouthernEra Resources Ltd., and their search has

focussed on the clay in the sample holes.

It is rare clay, greyish with a faint tinge of blue-green, and geologist Howard Bird bends down to

pick some up. Bird is the senior geologist here, a South African by birth, hospitable and wry.

Earlier, he listened while the other scientists told me exactly how SouthernEra was searching for

diamonds in the Munn Lake area. "Now that you know all that," he said dryly, "we have to kill

you." But instead they brought me out here to their exploration drill, two kilometres north of their

base camp, to look at clay.

Bird accompanies us back to the helicopter with clay in hand, and a few minutes later we are

setting down at the camp. We land beside a low, rounded shelf of bedrock that has been

smoothed and plucked by a glacier, as an ice cream cone is licked and bitten by a child. It is a

roche moutonnee, says glacial geologist Lisa Sankeralli. Such patterns in rocks are arrows to the

glacial geologist: by them she can determine the directions in which the ancient ice sheets moved.

This is essential to the diamond hunters. They must follow the glacial paths if they want to trace

the source of this clay.

Bird carries the clay over to the office tent, where he picks through it with tweezers and puts

several bits into a petri dish. He places the dish under a microscope and squints into the eyepiece

- a culminating moment in the day's search.

To find diamonds, geologists must first locate the body of kimberlite rock in which they lie.

Millions of years ago the kimberlite bodies were fountains of thrusting molten rock. They

streamed up from deep within the earth's mantle, picking up diamonds as they went from the

surrounding rock, and then solidified into large rock plumes called pipes. The bluish-green clay is

weathered kimberlite - a bit of the treasure chest, so to speak. The chest has been splintered and

scattered across the land by glaciers. To find the treasure, SouthernEra must trace the splinters

back to their source.

Under the microscope, the tiny grains are glittering stones. They have the clear-cut, faintly

hallucinatory stillness that things have under a microscope. The mauve grains are pyropes, says

Bird. The orange one is an eclogitic garnet. These are indicator minerals - splinters from the

treasure chest. The chemical composition of indicator minerals can tell a geologist whether the

kimberlite has diamonds or not. One of the main purposes of the SouthernEra camp is to collect

and screen samples of glacial till, so that the indicators can be easily isolated and further analyzed

at their Yellowknife lab.

There is something else here under the microscope, something smaller than the other granules.

Unmagnified it is the size of a grain of sand. Magnified it is a small crystalline oval, filled with the

transparent light of water.

Sometimes this happens, geologist Uwe Naeher says mildly. Sometimes you find a tiny diamond

among the indicator minerals.

For this kind of gem, geologists have scoured the central Northwest Territories from the air and

water and land, have trekked The paths of the vanished ice sheets, have stood on frozen lakes at

-50 [degrees] C, their breath freezing under their balaclavas, while they read the drill core laid

out before them. They are all part of Canada's newest exploration boom.

About 100 kilometers north of the SouthernEra camp is the place where Canada's diamond rush

began. It is on the shore of Lac de Gras, about 300 kilometers northeast of Yellowknife. The

country there looks almost exactly the same as Munn Lake: berries abound, caribou meander,

and the tundra gives under your feet like thick carpet. But Lac de Gras is now famous in the

mining world. It was here in 1990 that a Canadian geologist named Chuck Fipke found

"diamondiferous kimberlite." Fipke made his discovery using the standard methods of diamond

hunting, such as tracking the indicator minerals. But he had to take into account the northern

landscape to do it. In particular, he had to solve the colossal riddles created by glaciation.

For glaciation has made a mess of things up here - a grand, fascinating mess. This turmoil began

between one and two million years ago, at the beginning of the Pleistocene Era. Huge ice sheets

mumbled across the Northwest Territories, leaving a vast, confusing bed of echoes in the

landforms. Underlying rock - especially soft rock like kimberlite - was eroded away. The

glaciers sliced off the tops of the kimberlite pipes, dragging the indicator minerals with them.

Melting, they left the indicators behind in the glacial till. The last glacier melted 10,000 years ago.

Fipke did a lot of puzzling in the early days. By all accounts he was a man built to tackle open-air

puzzles - with a B.Sc. in geology, the stamina of a wolf and the eye of a rock gypsy who had

prospected all over the world. Since 1981 he had been looking for diamonds in the N.W.T.

Early on in the game he acquired a bush-wise partner, Stewart Blusson. Together they would

travel "up ice" - against the direction of the glacial flow, to find the source of the indicator

minerals.

Fipke and Blusson sifted through the glacial echoes and slowly traced the indicators to the

general area of Lac de Gras. Beyond there, the minerals trailed off suddenly - suggesting that the

two geologists had reached the limit of the pipe field. Now they had to zero in on it. By day they

chipped rock, sifted through till, studied lakes. By night they pored over maps and prayed for

good weather and readable ground - the geologists' prayer.

Judging by later events, they may also have asked the Deity to keep the diamonds away from

those who already had some. De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd., the mother of all

diamond-mining companies, was also in the area. The company's agents had been looking for

diamonds in Canada since the early 1960s but had found no economic blue ground (as kimberlite

is called in South Africa). Neither had BP Canada Inc. or Falconbridge Ltd. or any of the other

companies that had been hunting for diamonds in Canada.

All that changed one April day in 1990 when Fipke found what he had been tracking, on the

bank of tiny Point Lake near Lac de Gras. He discovered a rare kimberlitic mineral called

chrome diopside, which is generally found only very close to a pipe. Shortly afterwards, he and

Blusson made a deal with the Australian company Broken Hill Proprietary Ltd. (BHP), which

brought in aerial geophysical equipment to map and "contour" the still-hidden pipes. An

exploration drill was brought in and set up on the bank of Point Lake. On November 12, 1991,

BHP announced that the core sample contained 81 small diamonds, some of gem quality.

That announcement initiated the biggest staking rush in Canadian history. Today about 60

companies are exploring for diamonds in the area, including Monopros Ltd. - the Canadian

exploration subsidiary of De Beers. Many more kimberlite bodies have been found in the wake

of Fipke's discovery. Four very rich pipes were discovered right under Lac de Gras itself. These

are jointly owned by Diavik Diamond Mines Inc., the Canadian subsidiary of the mining giant Rio

Tinto plc, and the Canadian company Abet Resources Ltd. Two of the pipes have already been

subject to bulk sampling - preliminary mining done to determine the value of a deposit. This

project, known as the Diavik project, is just across the lake from the Fipke find.

Meanwhile, the area of Fipke's discovery is awash in a tide of intense labour. Hercules cargo

planes land and take off on the airstrip several times a day, carrying fuel and construction

supplies. Dormitories have been erected, power lines strung, a sewage plant installed. This will

be the site of Canada's first diamond mine, set to begin production in the fall of 1998. Fipke's

years of slogging have paid off: his company, Dia Met Minerals Ltd., owns 29 percent of the

project, while he and Stewart Blusson each have a personal stake of 10 percent. BHP Diamonds

is majority owner of the project, recently christened the Ekati mine.

The mine site is actually 27 kilometres northwest of Fipke's discovery, since, ironically enough,

the Point Lake kimberlite pipe proved unprofitable to mine. But five pipes here are viable -

flamboyantly so. Three of them are estimated to be among the world's richest diamond deposits.

The pipes are covered by shallow lakes, which are being drained. (Because kimberlite erodes

more easily than the surrounding bedrock, the pipes are often topped by depressions that have

filled with water.) All pipes will be mined using open-pit methods, and the richest ones will be

further plumbed by underground mining. The revenue for the mine, which is expected to have at

least a 25-year lifetime, is estimated at about $450 million a year.

And so exploration becomes extraction at this site, bringing with it an infusion of jobs and

revenue for the North. But of course it is not all dear sailing. As tracts of tundra are given over to

mining, the diamond enterprise comes face to face with other values, other needs.

On the wall of the new Legislative Assembly Building of the Northwest Territories hangs a

painting by native artist Antoine Mountain entitled "Mooseskin Boat." In it the boat of the tide,

each oar gripped by rowers, is riding fast water through the wilderness. On both sides of the

river are nebulous cliffs which, after a moment's viewing, resolve themselves into the shapes of

animals. It is a simple painting, done in simple fire-and-ice colours, but the idea is suggestive. A

fox barks from inside an outcrop; a grizzly walks a quartz vein. Rocks and animals share the

same space; the land is alive.

Some here reject the idea that mining the rocks will endanger the animals and the rest of the living

environment. The tundra is both vast and resilient, they argue; it can accommodate a few mines.

This view is frequently and forcefully expressed at The Diner restaurant in Yellowknife. The

Diner is well known as the gathering place for old-style local prospectors. If you dream of blue

ground, of the treasure silos under lakes, of pulling up drill core that is so seamed and spiced with

diamonds that the grizzled old driller becomes a babbling child again - if you dream of this, come

here at about 10 a.m. for a cup of coffee. You will be in good company. All around you will be

people of a practical bent - stakers, bushrats, men in camouflaged hunting caps - from whom you

can learn. When I went there I sat beside a man who had strung power lines at the Ekati mine.

He was not a prospector himself, but he impressed upon me what it was like to work on the land

up there.

"It's a great place for a mine," he said. "You've seen it - there' s nothing there. And you've seen it

at its best. In the winter it' s a wasteland. A few hours of crappy daylight, and then you got night.

You can't have a beard there. I had a beard but I shaved it off. It freezes because of your breath.

I seen guys take their hoods off and there they were with their beards stuck right to their hoods!"

This is one view of the tundra - as a desert, as the perfect place for a diamond mine. Mining

engineers would add another point in BHP' s favour: diamond mines are relatively benign. They

do not use harmful chemicals in the recovery process, the way gold mines use cyanide. The Ekati

mine will extract diamonds by pulverizing the mined rock and then using an X-ray process to

identify the crystals.

But still, the mine is a large operation, and any project of that size cannot help but have some

impact on the environment. And, since more than 100 other pipes have been discovered on

BHP's claim block, it is safe to assume that mining activity will soon cover an even greater area.

What will this mean for the vegetation and wildlife of the region?

This is the big concern of Kevin O'Reilly of the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee. His

organization was one of several environmental groups that participated in the Environmental

Assessment Panel's hearings on the BHP project, which were held in early 1996. BHP had

already submitted its eight-volume Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which included studies

of the region's caribou, wolves, grizzlies, fish and vegetation. O'Reilly's group, however, found

the studies inadequate.

"In virtually all the areas they examined - botany, wildlife, socioeconomic effects, you name it -

the information was deficient," he says. "Because the EIS wasn't well done, we couldn't

understand what the effects of the mine were going to be - so how could we even talk about

mitigation measures?"

For this reason he disagrees with the verdict of the federally appointed Environmental

Assessment Panel, which concluded that "the environmental effects of the project are largely

predictable and mitigable." But one good thing has come out of the hearings, says O'Reilly. An

independent environmental monitoring agency has been set up.to serve as a watchdog. It will

review the designs of environmental studies - both BHP's and the government's - and comment

on the results.

Such close scrutiny is going to become increasingly important in the next few years, when the

diamond frontier expands. "There are a whole bunch of potential mines out there," says O'Reilly.

"BHP is just the thin edge of the wedge. The question is, how can we assess all the environmental

effects of these together?"

Construction continues at the Ekati mine. Just southeast of there, a small crew manages the

Diavik site while engineers contemplate the best way to mine the pipes under Lac de Gras. The

current proposal is to build a berm around the bay, drain the water and then begin open-pit and

underground mining. South of Lac de Gras, SouthernEra has moved into its winter drilling

program. Snow is coming, white against the grey of Munn Lake.

At dusk, if you fly across the general region of Lac de Gras, you can see the lights of exploration

drills twinkling against the tundra. Even from the air it is clear that mining diamonds in this land

carries with it a host of challenges - technical and environmental. But some people don't come

here for those challenges. They don't even come here to get rich (although that may be a

secondary consideration). They come here to track rocks. This is a challenge somewhat like

tracking wolves to their dens, or caribou to their calving grounds, except that the trail leads over

land that is long gone. To follow the mineral auguries, geologists must walk the ancient

meltwaters, decipher the glacial glyphs. In doing so, they may find themselves being swallowed

up by the chase. At night the sky will tent immensely over them, veined and foliate with stars, but

this will only remind them of the things they have not yet found - the hardest things in the world,

buried deep under this lichen-covered land.