It’s not every day that you find diamonds outcropping at surface in the Arctic and some miners will go a lifetime without ever seeing it happen. Oftentimes, kimberlite pipes of interest in the Far North are buried by overburden or are under lakes, and can only be accessed by drilling.
Eric Friedland is one of the lucky ones. In the last two months, the chief executive of Peregrine Diamonds (PGD-T, PGDIF-O) has seen two kimberlite outcrops on the company’s Chidliak property on remote Baffin Island, about 150 km northeast of Iqaluit.
“We didn’t expect any of these to outcrop, it’s never happened in my career before,” Friedland said in a telephone interview from his Vancouver office.
Since the first discovery of its roughly six-hectare CH-1 kimberlite in July, Peregrine has found a second, 3-ha outcropping about 1.5 km away from the first.
CH-2 measures 20 by 25 metres and the kimberlitic material is similar to CH-1, consisting of kimberlite breccia and magmatic kimberlite.
“At an estimated six and three hectares respectively, CH-1 and CH- 2 demonstrate that Canada’s newest diamond district has excellent kimberlite tonnage potential,” the company stated in a release.
The Saskatchewan Research Council (SRC) Geoanalytical Laboratories processed surface samples for diamonds by caustic fusion from two different CH-1 kimberlite units.
Sample 1B weighed 94.9 kg and returned 146 diamonds larger than the 0.075-mm sieve size, including 10 diamonds larger than the 0.6-mm sieve size.
As for follow-up work, Peregrine has identified 65 kimberlite-type geophysical anomalies from its ongoing survey.
“We’ve got about another 65 or more anomalies, many of them with similar signatures to CH-1 and CH- 2,” Friedland adds. “And our best indicator
‘Our best indicator mineral trains haven’t been tested yet, so I think there are a lot of legs left on this project. We’re just getting started.’
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