how to find diamonds in the hunter call of the wild

Illustration: Bryan ChristieFipke heard about Gurney's work on a tour of De Beers' Finsch Mine in South Africa and quickly turned himself into an expert on indicator minerals - combining what he understood of Gurney's work with results coming out of Russian labs and his own skills with field sampling.

The Snap Lake site is one of four diamond mines established in Canada in recent years. He examined a host of pipes in South Africa that had these so-called indicator minerals and published a paper explaining his results. He used an electron microprobe to analyze geological structures called kimberlite pipes - the places you occasionally (but not often) find diamonds - and discovered that the presence of chromite, ilmenite, and high-chrome, low-calcium garnet did indeed predict a rich strike. A couple of years prior, a geologist named John Gurney, working with Superior's money at the University of Cape Town, hypothesized that certain common minerals might reliably form alongside diamonds.

Photo: Andrew HetheringtonThe company already had a search method. The wilderness around Snap Lake, in Canada's Northwest Territories, conceals a trove of diamonds. De Beers mined 75 percent of the world's output, much of it tainted by controversial ' blood diamonds,' sold to fund African wars.

Diamonds came mostly from Australia, Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, and Russia. Fipke has learned to understand those grains of dirt, and that understanding has led him to diamonds.Įighteen years ago, there was no such thing as a Canadian diamond - as far as anyone knew. It's painstaking work but worth the trouble. Then his technicians, working with scanning electron microscopes, separate out grains and mount them on postage-stamp-sized squares of epoxy. He sieves the earth, runs it through magnetic drums and centrifuges and electromagnetic separators. 'We take samples, hey, from gravel and streambeds all over the world,' Fipke says. * Photo: Andrew Hetherington * Behind an unmarked door in a faded business park outside Kelowna, British Columbia, in a maze of rooms crowded with desks, computers, and floor-to-ceiling shelves, Chuck Fipke sifts through 20-pound bags of dirt. Diamond hunter Chuck Fipke spreads out maps of potential new discoveries.

How to find diamonds in the hunter call of the wild