The wholly owned, 101-sq.-km property is 25 km north of Wawa, inland from the north shore of Lake Superior and just east of the Trans-Canada Highway.
Unlike the typical kimberlite-hosted diamond deposits targeted elsewhere in Canada, most of the diamonds recovered at Festival are hosted in metamorphosed, ultramafic volcanic rocks that originated at depth within the earth’s diamond stability field.
Pele’s discovery of the Genesis showing is the latest chapter in the developing story of diamond exploration in the Wawa area.
The seminal event occurred in 1993, when prospector Mickey Clement found a couple of 1-carat diamonds (now housed at the Royal Ontario Museum) in the Michipicoten River, south of Wawa.
The discovery sparked diamond exploration in the area, with the Ontario Geological Survey carrying out regional till sampling and a few companies following up on the indicator minerals.
In 1995, prospector Sandor Surmaz sampled a fragment-bearing, lamprophyric mafic dyke along the Trans-Canada Highway, 25 km north of Wawa. It came back diamondiferous — the first diamonds in bedrock found in the area.
Toronto-based
In 1996 and 1997, Spider carried out a sampling program that targeted lamprophyric dykes and discovered several more diamond occurrences. However, the dykes were narrow and discontinuous, and the diamond distribution within them proved to be erratic. Spider ended that phase of diamond exploration in late 1997 and let some claims lapse.
The area was then fairly quiet until early 2000, when three prospectors — Terry Nicholson, Michael Tremblay and Jack Robert — discovered more diamonds along the Silver Birch logging road, in a geological setting similar to Surmaz’s original find.
The prospectors soon cut a deal with Toronto-based
At first, Band-Ore continued to sample along the road, focusing on rocks that were ultramafic with heterolithic fragments. However, during their sampling, they uncovered the GQ property’s Engagement zone, which shifted attention away from fine-grained, mafic lamprophyric dykes to something that looked more volcaniclastic and was microdiamond-rich.
Toronto-based Pele entered the Wawa play in May 2000, acquiring 12 sq. km of ground immediately north of the GQ property in what is now the southern portion of the Festival property. Pele soon made a couple of diamond discoveries and then expanded the property to its current size.
Taking its cue from Band-Ore, Pele looked for extensions of GQ’s diamond occurrences that came north on to Pele ground and, in 2001, discovered several more diamond occurrences at Festival, most notably the Cristal showing along the southeastern border with the GQ property.
Late in 2001, Pele took its first bulk sample at the property — a 100-tonne sample from the Cristal volcanic complex. The Canadian exploration division of
“In that population of stones, there were some incredibly beautiful, well-preserved octahedrals with sharp edges,” says Pele President Al Shefsky. “Before that, I don’t think people realized that this type of rock had those kinds of commercial-size, gem-quality diamonds.”
Using its “total-content model,” De Beers forecast a grade for Cristal of 0.06 carat per tonne, down to a 1,000-micron (1-mm) square-mesh cutoff. The grade, though not of a commercial calibre, did encourage further work at the property.
This past summer, Pele focused primarily on the Festival property’s southwestern corner, greatly advancing the geological understanding of the property and making more discoveries, including the watershed Genesis showing.
Comments Edward Walker, the key consulting geologist to Pele at Festival and president of Lakefield, Ont.-based firm Petrologic: “In a nutshell: before this year, we were seeing the diamond-bearing rock units in concentrations along corridors in the area; now, through more detailed work, we’re able to show that there is a stratigraphic variation across dip.
“Essentially, 98% of the volcaniclastic rocks you see in this area are diamond-bearing, or at least part of that sequence,” says Walker. “So we have everything from primitive ash-lapilli tuffs to inner-outer crater facies and likely apron-ring material and deposits outside it. Plus, with the subsequent volcanic activity, we’re getting debris flows that are also diamond-bearing.”
Transition
Generally at Festival, there appears to be a transition from submarine mafic volcanism to subaerial mafic volcanism with some minor rhyolite. Additionally, a paleosurface of these primary deposits — found right across the property — is within this transition zone.
To complicate the picture, all these units have been overturned, as was first detailed through regional mapping of the area by the Ontario Geological Survey in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
“Everything we’ve seen so far supports the idea that we’re looking at a single fold limb that has been overturned, and there’s some faulting and thrusting,” says Walker.
He describes how, when Pele first started exploring Festival, geologists saw concentrations of volcanic units with similar characteristics occurring along strike within northwest-trending corridors. “Now we’re starting to link up these corridors, and we’re starting to see some of the potential size of the units.”
The first grab sample at Genesis, reported in August, weighed 17 kg and returned 308 diamonds, including 53 commercial-sized ones, of which two were retained in the plus-600-micron mesh.
Pele quickly returned to Genesis and in September took a 4.5-tonne mini-bulk sample that was processed at the company’s on-site facility. The sample produced the best-ever results from the property: 53 diamonds above the plus-600-micron threshhold, including 30 larger than 1 mm.
The measured grade, 0.12 carat per tonne, is an order of magnitude better than anything seen so far at Festival, and the higher, modelled grade is at a level greater than that seen at some commercial mines, though results from bulk samples below 200 kg must be viewed with caution.
Magnetic separation
Pele is able to recover diamonds at Festival using low-cost magnetic separation, owing to the host rocks being metamorphosed to a lower greenschist facies. (All the ultramafic minerals have metamorphosed into a couple of different types of amphibole, plus mica and chlorite — the amphiboles and the mica are magnetically susceptible, whereas diamond is not.)
The Genesis diamonds are hosted in mafic-to-ultramafic lapilli-ash tuffs, which appear to come from the central part of a crater.
“The fascinating thing is that, with this stratigraphy and outline, we can actually see, within the pillow volcanics, the outline of the crater,” says Walker, who estimates that the the crater at Genesis is more than 2 km in diameter.
“It’s a huge geological event — it has ultramafic characteristics, it has ultramafics fragments in it, and it’s loaded with diamonds.”
He’s not sure if some of the diamond deposits are out on the ring or if they’re apron-type: “It all depends on the orientation, so we need to do more geology to follow it up. Clearly, we’re seeing that the geology is becoming more and more important.”
The Wawa volcanogenic deposits are the world’s oldest diamond deposits discovered so far, coming in at 2.7 billion years (many kimberlite deposits are less than 50 million years old).
Walker says these volcanogenic deposits “have more features than diamond deposits usually have but that, in the end, there’s essentially nothing new; it’s just new thinking.”
He notes that peridotitic diamonds — the main population of diamonds — are dated at more than 3 billion years in terms of their diamond formation event in the mantle, but that the magma at Festival is coming out of the mantle at 2.7 billion years.
Youngest diamond
“In theory, they should be sampling the same population of diamonds as kimberlite did, but a [slightly] younger population. So the oldest rock has the youngest diamond in them. And it makes sense, because when we see the diamonds, we’re not seeing any significant boart population, and that’s probably due to the fact that there are not that many growth and regrowth events in the mantle.
“We’re going after the coarse-diamond population. One of the big cynicisms of this whole package since the original discovery is that it’s just a simple microdiamond deposit and never going to amount to anything else — especially with the early discoveries in the area being in a lamprophyric-type phase. There are lots of examples around the world of lamprophyres that never have diamonds above 0.5 mm in size.”
“That stigma is still attached to the deposit — wrongly so — because we’ve clearly demonstrated, in multiple samples by Pele, Band-Ore and even Spider, that a macrodiamond population is there, and as you increase the sample sizes, you get the bigger stones.”
With the Genesis results in hand, Pele returned to the capital markets and, in late October, entered into a proposed placement with Dundee Securities. The placement will consist of up to 4.2 million flow-through units priced at 24 each for gross proceeds of up to $1 million (Pele has traded in the 20-to-30 range for most of the past two years, for a market cap below $6 million.).
Each unit will consist of a flow-through share and half a non-transferable warrant. A whole warrant would allow the holder to buy one flow-through share for 32 within 12-18 months.
The funds will be directed to exploring Festival.
Genesis West
Since the financing announcement, Pele has discovered one more diamond showing, Genesis West, 350 metres west of the main Genesis showing. A 19.4-kg sample returned 51 diamonds, the largest of which was a fragment measuring 0.68 by 0.60 by 0.52 mm.
Pele’s low-tech, low-cost style of exploration at Festival varies dramatically from much of the current work going on in Canada, which targets kimberlite pipes.
Glacial till sampling is almost redundant at Festival since diamond-bearing rock outcrops through much of the property, and geophysical surveying has proved to be of little use.
In fact, with its multitude of readily accessible sites, there has not been a great rush to bring in a drill rig — though, in the next phase of exploration, some holes will likely be drilled in order to gain a better understanding of the showings in the third dimension.
Comments Shefsky: “The recent sampling has elevated Genesis to a different kind of need than the rest of the property, which is at the exploration stage. Genesis is at a point where it becomes more of an evaluation towards outlining a minable resource. If the grade [at Genesis] is indicative of the rest of the body, we’re going to have something there that’s really interesting. All the grade curves suggest there are big diamonds in the populations, and potentially economic grades.”
Pele also has two Ontario gold projects on the shelf: the Wawa project, situated east of Festival, and the Ardeen Mine project, west of Thunder Bay.
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