Everyone said KCOTT effed up the tests. What is a mystery is why they decided to do the tests in the 1st place. Why 20,000 tons?
Well they must have had some geochem evidence. Geochems rarely lie. One group of tests I have always suspected it the 1970 Cominco tests on the K-lites on Somerset Island. They tested low, by a portable sortex (X-Ray sorter) machine. But no one uses just a sortex to recover diamonds. Only 20% of diamonds fluoresce. (Russian data) Most plants use DMZ, grease, flotation, gravity AND sortex altogether. Were the Cominco tests invalid in using only sortex? Was the sortex machine set right? was it well run? Russians who developed Sortex tell me that it takes a bit of setup. Were their Stateline tests of the Co-Wy brdr. also badly done around the same era? R. Mitchell, a former geoprof who worked on the Somerset K-Lites said the diatremes, incidentally found visually, were bad chem and their chem predicted their low grade. High calcium/aluminum etc. I am not sure about that. 20-20 hind site?
I would not want to Tli Kwi Cho again, regardless of the doubt field presented. What we never hear about that Griffin and Ryan discovered, about nickel thermometry and its efficacy in determining grade without pyrope, we never hear from CDN explorationists. Some say they do it, but although we hear about G-10 levels they never say boo about NT. I think they are BSing. They don't know squat about it, or its interpretation. Would that they did know more about geochem, as it would save a lot of testing. Sobolev found dozens of K-Lites miles up ice by testing pyrope for chem only. Apparently it works. And he tested few pyropes and found many K-lites. Exactly where he said he would find them to the mile.
Peripherally, R. Mitchell did a lot of study at the High Pressure Physics Institure in Moscow for years. He formed his own geobarythermometry ideas from that research. The Russians led the field of Chem geusswork for many years. They based their work on Australian curves developed in the 1950's which guided W J Atkinson, in his investigations of the Namibian Dykes off the coast of africa in the 1970's. This work did much to confirm continental drift. Later Gurney, thought by many to be a pack leader in pyrope analysis expanded on the Russian work. Still later when the Argyle K-lite was found to be a 695 carat per hundred ton wonder, Griffin and Ryan in Kangaroo Land had done nickel temperature, by proton probe, not electron probe and predicted its grade to the carat, before the bulk sample had been done and the grade confirmed.
Chemistry anyone?
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