Wawa diamond finds unique.

New rock type indicate greater potential for diamond mining

There was a lot of speculation about the viability of diamond exploration in the Wawa area, but recent results may prove skeptics wrong, says the president of a junior mining company.

Band-Ore Resources Ltd., one of the mining companies exploring in the Wawa area, has made an "exciting" discovery - a quarter-carat diamond, says Wayne O'Connor.

The quarter-carat diamond measures 3.74 by 3.3 by 3.1 millimetres and was taken from, a 12.5-tonne exploration sample.

This is the largest diamond recovered from a bedrock source in the Wawa area, O'Connor says.

In addition to this diamond, there were 29 other diamonds, ranging in size from 3.06 to 0.70 millimetres, recovered from the same sample. Twenty-seven of the diamonds had two dimensions greater than 1.0 millimetre, four of which had two dimensions greater than 2.0 millimetres. The diamonds varied in colour between white, yellow, pink, brown, gray and black.

"We have defined a huge area that has diamonds - a high frequency of diamonds - across roughly 600 metres in length and 75 metres wide." O'Connor says. "It has implications for huge tonnage potential. It's very encouraging."

Band-Ore is exploring an area approximately 20 kilometres from Wawa. O'Connor says they have established the presence of large quantities of diamonds in an Archean-aged geological environment not previously known to contain any significant diamonds.

Brian Atkinson, resident geologist for the district, says the find breaks new ground in the diamond-mining industry. The rocks from which these diamond samples have been extracted are not typically known to be host for diamonds, he says.

Rock types that genetically are associated with diamonds include: kimberlite, orangeite, lamproite and lamprophyre. However, Atkinson says this exploration is generating diamond in non-kimberlite Archean-aged rocks.

"A challenge the companies exploring in the area face, is they have to prove that it is going to be viable to mine there because (the source is) not like traditional sources of diamonds known," Atkinson says. "These companies are really starting from scratch, and there is not a lot of background information to guide exploration. This approach is entirely a learning process."

However, O'Connor says that while the rocks found at the Wawa site do not contain typical kimberlite indicator minerals, it is still producing diamond sample, which is encouraging for mining companies.

"The fact that we recovered a quarter-carat diamond is a very positive sign because it's the first time a commercial-sized diamond has been found in bedrock area," O'Connor says. "It's rapidly changing the face of Wawa."

Unlike diamond mines in the Northwest Territories where diamonds are covered by lakes and hundreds of feet of overburden, diamonds in Wawa are being recovered near the surface in boulders and outcrops, O'Connor says.

Another company exploring the Wawa area is finding similar success.

Alan Shefsky, president of Pele Mountain Resources, says exploration is shaping up to indicate "great" diamond-mining potential in Wawa.

The company's exploration has been so successful it has allowed them to step up their activity, leading to the discovery of a new rock host, which Shefsky says has even better mining prospects.

"There's a new type of rock that we found only in the past few months that seems to be associated with even a higher concentration of diamonds," Shefsky says.

"And these (findings) continue to offer very strong potential for getting into more economic diamond concentrations."

The recently discovered rock types found to be host to diamond are Salon and Moet breccias. The results show that the Salon breccia is averaging more than two diamonds per kilogram, and the Moet breccia has a size distribution of diamonds that includes coarser-sized diamonds in the relatively small samples processed to date.