“The diamonds we have discovered are small and not economical, however, they have been discovered in ancient sediments that are an accurate analogue of the world’s largest gold deposit: the Witwatersrand gold fields in South Africa, which has produced more than 40% of the gold. never extracted on Earth,” said Graham Pearson, a researcher at the Faculty of Science and winner of canada’s Chair of Excellence in Arctic Resource Research.
“Diamonds and gold are very bedmates. They almost never appear on the same rock, so this new discovery can help melt the appeal of the original gold discovery if we can locate more diamonds. “
Pearson explained that former W. T. Geological Survey scientist Val Jackson alerted his organization to an outcrop on the Arctic coast that bears great similarities to Witwatersrand’s gold deposits.
Pearson claimed that this outcrop of rocks, known as clusters, is necessarily the product of the erosion of the ancient mountain levels that sit on the braided canals of the river.
“These are high-energy deposits that are smart to carry gold, and are smart to carry diamonds,” he said. “Our feeling that if the analogies are so close, then there may also be diamonds in the Nunavut conglomerate. “
Pearson stated that the discovery of new diamond deposits in northern Canada is for Canada, proceeding to space out a diamond mining industry of $2. 5 billion a year.
Then, based on an intuition, Pearson used the most recent investment of his Chair of Excellence in Research canada that took him to A University, as an investment for the assignment of Metal Earth and the National Science Foundation, and – accompanied by postdoctoral diamond researcher Adrien Vizinet and Jesse Reimink, a former graduate student at the University of California , now a professor at penn State UniversityArray, went to Nunavut.
Once on site, the organization, with the help of Silver Range Resources, whose CEO Mike Power is also a former U of A student, reached about 15 kilograms of the conglomerate and feched those rocks with state-of-the-art mass spectrometry devices at A-U, which established its deposit about 3 billion years ago.
The organization temporarily delivered its samples to the Saskatchewan Research Council, the world leader in quantifying the amount of diamonds on a rock.
Pearson recalls the exact moment about a year later, when Christian Mircea of the Council, who travels to Edmonton to teach academics at the School of Diamond Exploration Studies (DERTS) about diamond indicator minerals, in fact told him that the skipper produced 3 diamonds.
“My jaw hit the ground, ” said Pearson. ” Normally, other people would take loads of kilograms, or even tons of samples, to verify and locate as many diamonds as possible. We control to place diamonds on 15 pounds of rock we sampled. “with a mass in a shallow outcrop. “
Although the diamonds discovered are small, less than a millimeter in diameter, he said the geological implications are immense.
First, Pearson claimed that there will have to be kimberlite or rock like kimberlite to send diamonds to the Earth’s surface in ancient Earth, a perception that many other people have questioned.
Kimberlite pipes are the ducts that allow magma to erupt diamonds and other rocks and minerals from the Earth’s mantle, bark, and surface.
It also helps us to perceive in which situations those specific kimberlitic rocks can form.
Pearson said an Italian collaborator, Fabrizio Nestola of the University of Padua, had controlled the location of an inclusion, a diamond-free mineral, in one of the diamond samples. From there, Suzette Timmerman, a researcher at the Canadian Center for Isotopes Microanalysis and recipient of the Banting Postdoctoral Scholarship, began to build a theory that diamonds should be derived from a small deep but bloodless lithospheric root, which is the thickest component of all. the continental plate.
“This is absolutely unforeseen for what we believe situations were 3 billion years ago on Earth,” Pearson said.
He explained that solid diamonds only exist in the bloodless portions of the mantle, suggesting that there must be very deep bloodless roots, perhaps two hundred kilometers thick under parts of the continent very early in Earth’s history.
Pearson stated that despite A University’s experience in diamond dating around the world, there is still a discussion about the dating between inclusion and diamond deposit.
“Here, there’s no argument that we know when those rocks eroded on the Earth’s surface,” he said.
“This tells us that there is an older source, an important source of diamonds that will have to have been eroded to shape this diamond deposit over gold,” he said.
It also means that diamond mining in the region would necessarily require very deep mines, if cheaper outcrops of those rocks can be found.
“We went there on a seaplane, hit a piece of rock with a mallet and discovered three diamonds,” he said. “This is one of the most amazing parts of this discovery. “
He added that the provincial government, Alberta Innovates, had obviously understood that universities could make a significant contribution to the expansion and diversification of Alberta’s mining economy.
“Government investment allows us to dispel intuitions that might otherwise be difficult for industry to examine. “
Pearson referred to the collaborative studies and education of the Canadian Council for Research in Natural Sciences and Engineering, which nearly made the U of A the world’s leading diamond studies establishment through DERTS education.
“Alberta has several prospective diamond deposits and mature spaces for additional exploration,” he said. “The University of Alberta can play a key role in helping locate and identify diamond and other mineral mines in Alberta. “
Pearson stated that further studies are being conducted on similar outcroppings nearby in progression through Silver Range Resources in collaboration with the Metal Earth Project, the Nunavut Government and Penn State University to identify the extent of diamonds and gold on those rocks, as well as number one imaginable sources, minerals.