Diamonds North tests Beluga-3’s diamond potential

Diamonds North Resources (DDN-V) has wrapped up a recent drilling campaign on its flagship Amaruk project, in the Kugaaruk area of eastern Nunavut.

The program was designed to collect a 25-tonne mini-bulk sample from Beluga-3, a kimberlite that the company believes shows promising potential for commercial-size diamonds, based on the results of last year’s work. Processing of the sample is expected to begin by November.

Beluga-3 is one of 25 kimberlites discovered to date on the 100%-owned project located in the heart of Pelly Bay district, where Diamonds North is the dominant landowner. The company’s focus in this region is based on the presence of abundant favourable indicator mineral trains and kimberlite float occurrences in a central core block spanning an area of about 80 km.

“Several kimberlites have shown very high diamond content; what we have not seen yet is an abundance of commercial-size stones,” stated president and CEO Mark Kolebaba, in a May newsletter to shareholders.

Discovered by drilling in 2008, in an area of favourable indicator mineral chemistry (high-chrome garnet population), Beluga-3 was not identifiable in the original or follow-up airborne surveys. Ground geophysics identified Beluga-3 as a lower-priority subtle magnetic high target.

An initial 1-tonne sample of Beluga-3 was collected from the discovery hole and analyzed for macrodiamonds only. That sample returned a diamond content of 0.2 carat per tonne, based on the recovery of 32 diamonds exceeding a 0.5-mm size cutoff. Four of the largest stones were classified as fragments, suggesting the potential for commercial-size diamonds.

In 2009, a 6.7-tonne kimberlite sample was collected by reverse circulation drilling from Beluga-3, returning 126 diamonds greater than 0.5-mm size, including 9 larger diamonds on the 1.18-mm screen and 1 fragmented stone on the 1.7-mm screen. Diamonds North estimates this fragment to have been a diamond between 0.2 and 0.25 carat in weight. A high proportion of the diamonds recovered are white, clear octahedrons.

This year, a newly designed lightweight bulk-sampling drill, using reverse circulation without percussion, was used in an effort to reduce diamond breakage.

Further interest in the immediate area around Beluga-3 has been fuelled by a comparison of garnet chemistry from the Beluga-3 kimberlite and surrounding till samples. The high-priority garnet chemistry observed in the till was not recovered in the 2009 Beluga-3 kimberlite sample suggesting an untested phase of kimberlite is present in Beluga-3 and/or the potential for the discovery of additional kimberlites in the area.

Diamonds North at presstime was trading at 20¢ in a 52-week range of 15¢-39.5¢, with 86.9 million shares outstanding, or 95.8 million fully diluted.