russett to George,
1. : Pipe theory, generally accepted but almost always in a field of pipes. Once pressure builds up down below, it is rarely alleviated by just one pipe. Imagine a tree, with roots and trunk down below the diamond genesis zone which is about 150 to 300km below our feet. The branches grow through the diamond stability zone, carrying the diamonds along with them until they get within a few miles of the earth. These branches follow faults in the earth's surface caused likely by some big event like an earthquake, meteor collision, earth cooling or gravitational induced stress. Keep in mind, this tree must grow very fast,...many km per hour,...to take the diamonds to cooler areas or the diamonds get vaporized by the high heat of the magma carrying them. Once the branch gets a few miles from the earth's surface, the weight of the overlying earth can no longer hold it back, and the speed of growth to the surface picks up to 30+ km per hour, and then blammo!!,.... it erupts at the surface, maybe contacting groundwater, or sea water which generates steam and can really blow things up well. Imagine near atomic bombs blowing up along and near the faults, a few kilometers apart.
Initially the pressure down below is alleviated, but these volcanic eruptions likely continue to happen over centuries along the same branches or along new branches,...some may go through a diamond genesis zone,..some may not,...some may vaporize their diamonds before they reach the surface. Eventually the area is sealed by cooled lava and activity stops. The diamonds can be found all over the ground and in the pipe system itself, but concentrations of diamonds in this rock are rarely economic to mine. Only a rare pipe has enough diamonds in its kimberlite (or whatever "ite") to make money on.
2. and 3. and many others: Now Boulay envisions these fields of pipes blowing their load into a shallow sea. The material ejected would settle around the hole on the sea floor. Then other sediments would fall on top of this mess of volcanic debris. Then the pipe may blow again, or one nearby may blow producing more volcanic debris which again settle to the sea floor. The result of all this spewing and settling would be horizontal layers which may have diamonds, but they will be mixed in with lots of sea floor sediments,...plants, animals, alluvials etc., etc. This would create horizontal layers, but would dilute the carats/tonne a lot I would think. The pipes may have diamonds too, but they would be at the bottom of these horizontal layers making them harder to detect and get at.
Now, if this volcanic mess (which is good at grabbing metal ions that are pushed through it by either hot mineralizing fluids or metal ion rich water under pressure) was spewed on top of a large source of such mineralizing fluids, anomalous (meaning higher than normal) concentrations of metals could occur in this kimberlite. This does occur in many of the world's diamond mining districts.
If we find that an economic heavy metal mine is under the Chinchaga land, it might be possible to preprocess the rock to remove any diamonds, then process the remainder in the standard way to remove the metals. Time will tell whether it would be worthwhile to bother with the diamonds first. As this volcanic layer is 5-10 meters thick (where measured) and extends over at least 30 sq kilometers,...Mr. Boulay has a big area to explore.
The highest concentration of minerals would occur around faults and cracks in the earth around our spew of sulphide rich volcanics, as these areas allow the mineralizing fluids to flow faster through them over time,...so more gold, silver, etc., should be present near faults. They will now look for these faults by prospecting, and use of geophysical instruments,...and when they find them they will drill through them to see if mineral concentrations are indeed elevated. If they are, and the amounts are economic,..we will have a mine. If the fault zones are not economic, then the other areas likely are not either, so they won't waste time drilling any other areas, until they drill the fault zones.
The current batch of results were drilled over what they thought were kimberlite pipes,...they were not drilling the faults. The mineral numbers they report in the next few weeks from these zones will be lower, based on this line of reasoning, than the cores from the faulted areas. But if these next few weeks of results show gold near 1g/tonne and high values for other metals, we should expect much higher numbers around the fault lines, and much higher stock prices in the future.
russett |
