Diamond find at Festival proves low grade

The largest diamond recovered from a 100-tonne test sample of the Cristal showing on the Festival diamond property held near Wawa, Ont., weighed just 0.18 carat.

Property owner Pele Mountain Resources (YPN-V) reports that a 2.31-carat parcel comprising 96 diamonds exceeding a 1 mm square mesh cutoff was recovered by De Beers from the 100-tonne bulk-sample, giving an implied grade of only 0.02 carat per tonne, or 2.31 carats per 100 tonnes. De Beers processed the sample for Pele free of charge.

Based on previous microdiamond sampling of the Cristal showing, together with the latest macrodiamond results, De Beers predicts a modeled grade of 6 carats per 100 tonnes using a 1-mm square-mesh cutoff.

The bulk sample was taken in September 2001 from an outcrop of diamond-bearing, extrusive pyroclastic ultramafic breccia rock near the centre of the showing. Mapping and sampling of bedrock and boulders in the area suggest that the Cristal showing has a potential strike length that exceeds 400 metres and a width of more than 100 metres.

The Cristal showing consists of various mica breccias and pyroclastic facies of rock that, according to Pele, indicate large, explosive, maar-like volcanic complexes. Cristal is one of five diamond-bearing showings discovered by Pele.

Heterolithic tuff breccias occur at the base of the unit and grade upwards to lapilli tuff. The ground mass of the pyroclastic rocks is described by Kevin Kivi of Kennecott Canada Exploration and Edward Walker, an independent consultant with Petrologic, as fine-grained with variable proportions of small altered phenocrysts, including chloritized mica. The ground mass consists primarily of actinolitic amphibole, with rare to minor mica or granular albite.

These extrusive rocks host significant proportions of fragments generally derived from the local country rock. Rare to minor deep crustal and mantle rocks, such as banded gneiss and extensively altered talcose ultramafic xenoliths are also present.

The diamond-bearing meta-volcanic alkaline extrusive rocks are receiving the attention of Kennecott Canada Exploration, which has a preliminary option agreement to extract a 100-tonne test sample from the GQ property held by Band-Ore Resources (ban-t). The GQ property ties on to the southern and eastern boundaries of the Festival property, where, just 1.5 km south of Pele’s Cristal showing, Band-Ore made a significant diamond discovery at the Engagement zone. A diamond-bearing breccia unit was traced in outcrop and by trenching over a strike length of 325 metres and a width of up to 85 metres. Thirteen samples weighing 430 kg were found to contain more than 12,000 microdiamonds, including 340 stones greater than 0.5 mm in at least one dimension.

A 12.5-tonne sample taken from the Engagement zone in spring 2001 returned a parcel of 30 stones weighing 0.607 carat. The largest diamond was a broken, 0.254-carat, white octahedron measuring 3.74 by 3.3 by 3.1 mm. The other 29 diamonds were of various colours and ranged in size from 0.7 to 3.06 mm in their longest dimension.

During October and November 2001, Kennecott collected 66 outcrop channel samples representing a total weight of 660 kg from the Engagement zone. Kennecott also took an additional 1,200 kg of surface samples from other prospective showings on the GQ property. Microdiamond results are pending.