Thanks mater., here is a file just received by the infamous., and famous., the one and only Walter Humprhries., Mountain Man.,
hero of the North., prospector., local and national celebrity., and
just a downright good human being.
1998 Geoscience Forum in Yellowknife
Don?t let the numbers fool you, there were more people at the forum this year but fewer companies. A lot of people from Diavik, BHP and of course the government. Also for the first time a session on oil and gas plus an EXTECH meeting. (EXTECH is a program where government and industry work together to cover an area in detail in this case to concentrate on the Yellowknife Greenstone Belt to see if the mines? lives can be extended or new deposits found).
It was a fairly low key forum overall because most of the work in the Territories this past year was advancing existing programs not making new discoveries. Also with gold prices down, Lupin is not going to reopen this winter and Miramar Con is still on strike and the mine is being put on care and maintenance until further notice.
WINSPEAR
Had a chance to talk to Randy Turner and Walter Melnyk (chief geologist).
The core samples from last winters drilling were kept intact so that the cores could be looked at by the various geologists and visiting experts who came to the property this summer. So they weren?t sent in to be analyzed until the end of the field season. So they aren?t delayed just not processed yet. With a deposit of this nature I can understand wanting to keep them whole so that they could be studied.
The bulk sample will be released when ready.
The Snap Lake talk and display was good but nothing really new although it does help to see the things first hand.
The kimberlite is unremarkable in appearance. A dull grey rather nondescript rock. The airphoto of Snap was enormous. You could even see where the sample pits were. There is a slight overburden filled valley running across the peninsula and that hides the dyke.
In the talk, it was said that Nick Pokihenko the Russian geologist, knows of models for two blind pipes which occur in Russia. Blind pipes are ones which don?t come to surface, they are rare but do happen.
In exploration you drill a few holes get some data, formulate some ideas or theories and drill some more holes to see if they hold up or have to be revised. All the while you are looking at airphotos, geology maps, geophysical maps, plots of soil samples etc.
So they have the main dyke and decide to do some large step out holes. One they drilled from an island. It was suppose to hit the dyke at a certain depth, but didn?t. They continued to drilled for another 150 meters and finally hit a dyke. So was the dyke faulted and thus is deeper? Does the one dyke pinch out before reaching this spot and there is a second deeper dyke? Does the dyke radically change its dip? There really is no way to tell until you drill more holes.
Models are good ways to visualize things. The cone model is one such visualization but in reality nature is usually much more complex than the model and always throws in a few wrinkles.
The dykes do sort of point to a possible source and this area will be drilled. Something somehow feed the kimberlite into the main dyke and the auxillary dykes. Sooner or later they will find the source.
On the north shore of Snap Lake there is The Snap Crackle Fault (got to love the name) it is a complex fault system they know exists but haven?t figured it all out yet.
Winspear also did a lot of work on their other claims, which may lead to a number of new targets to drill. So not only is there Snap Lake, they have a lot of other prospects on the go with their own ground 100%WSP . They have, through indicator minerals and airborne, located a number of prospective targets. Also there is the Tyler option Carat Property up around Lac du Gras which has a number of targets identified.
So WSP has been busy and is probably one of the most active players in the north exploring.
A lot of people went to their display and were talking about it.
THE GIANT RUMBLES
MONOPROS
The big diamond companies are big. In a way they are like the oil companies. They have the resources and budgets most mining companies can just dream about.
Here is a bit of trivia from their talk. I jotted it down in a darkened room so may have missed a decimal point here or there so don?t take this for gospel but I found it interesting.
There are about 450 known kimerlites in Canada.
Monopros has 180 of them (80 of those are through joint ventures)
Their pipes occur in 15 clusters.
Thus they have approximately 25% of the pipes
In Canada they have done: 250,000 indicator mineral studies (probes)
flown 350,000 square kilometers of airborne
and taken 200,000 sediment samples.
They have two production and one research micro probe and do 500,000 analyses per year.
They do diamond breakage studies to determine if the breakages are imposed or natural.
They study the inclusions in diamonds which gives info on indicator minerals and pipe chemistry.
They have a huge database:
7,800 kimberlite occurences worldwide.
Major element geochemistry on indicators 4.9 million grains
Trace element geochemistry on indicators 108,000 grains
Xenoliths they have studied 12,500 nodules
Kimberlite geochronology at 950 locals
Documents and maps 71,000
Airborne geophysics 200 surveys
4 million line kilometers
Microdiamond inclusion studies 1500
The first diamond conference was in South Africa in 1973 and since then Monopros has produced 600 technical papers.
You just try to put a dollar figure on the above information and you are probably going to run out of room on your calculator.
That?s it for another year at the Geoscience Forum.
Regards,
Walt |
