To: VAUGHN who wrote (578 ) 1/9/2002 8:08:14 AM From: jpthoma1 Read Replies (1) | Respond to Good morning VAUGHN,On the Brodeur Peninsula of Baffin Island, 100 km east of Somerset Island, Twin Mining (TWG-T) has made an extraordinary find at its Jackson Inlet property. Numerous commercial-size gem stones were recovered from surface sampling of the Freightrain kimberlite body. What makes the find extraordinary -- even puzzling -- is that unlike the kimberlites being mined at Lac de Gras and elsewhere in the world , the Jackson Inlet diamonds are reported to differ in their "total absence of boart, rejections, coated and cubes, which are low-grade and low-yield diamonds." No explanation was given for this phenomenon, which is highly unusual, given current geological evidence on diamond distribution. "without having their characteristic yellow colouring." In comparison, the Lac de Gras diamonds from the Ekati and Diavik projects are "generally octahedrons with higher occurrences of black piques [impurities] and maccles [intergrown diamond crystals]." that no boarts occur in the micros either, though there have been a few cubes . Derbuch also said there is definitely a bias toward larger stones . The percentage of large diamonds is unusual, almost double that of known producers in the world. an apparent gap in the plotting of the size distribution of the microdiamonds recovered last year. "There are two populations of diamonds," The micros don't match the macros. There has been a sampling of two sources [by the kimberlite]." He added that there is a population of small stones (up to the 0.6-mm size fraction) that are separated from a population of larger +1-mm stones by three size fractions where only a sparse number of diamonds have been recovered. While it is possible in a single kimberlite to find multiple populations of diamond sizes, it's unusual for the populations not to overlap."
