Sanatana jumps on kimberlite results (December 24, 2007)

Vancouver — The first results from Sanatana Diamonds’ (STA-V) Dharma kimberlite pipe in the Northwest Territories sparked a storm of trading in the usually quiet junior, boosting its share price 416%.

The first batch, a 339-kg sample taken from 21 chunks of split drill core from the discovery hole, produced 180 diamonds greater than 0.106 mm. That equates to 531 stones recovered per tonne. The diamonds are described as being 60% white in colour and 23 have octahedral crystal habits.

The largest stone weighed 0.06 carat and measured 3.2 mm across, falling on a 1.7-mm sieve. The 0.85-mm sieve collected two diamonds; the 0.6-mm and 0.425-mm sieves each held 7; and the 0.3-mm sieve gathered 12. The 0.212-mm sieve caught 29 stones, the 0.15-mm sieve 45, and the 0.106-mm sieve, the remaining 77 stones.

Roughly 1 tonne of kimberlite was sent for microdiamond recovery; results from two remaining batches are pending.

Sanatana gained $1.33 on the news to close at $1.65, an all-time high for the junior on a record 4.3 million shares traded. Until now, the company had a 52-week trading range of 25-95 with 40.8 million shares issued.

In June 2004, Sanatana acquired some 80,937 sq. km of permits in an area north of Great Bear Lake, some 700 km northwest of Yellowknife, N.W.T., on the premise that a deep, cool craton existed under the project area.

The Mackenzie project, as it was named, has seen four years and roughly $20 million in exploration and has been consolidated into 23,876 sq. km of permits. The Dharma kimberlite pipe is in the Greenhorn project area, one of six regions in the project area with anomalous geochemical mineral concentrations.

The pipe is a prominent geophysical anomaly at the head of a kimberlite indicator mineral anomaly. Since kimberlites generally occur in clusters, the company has several drill-ready targets near Dharma. The potential for additional kimberlite in the Greenhorn area is supported by till sampling, which shows a regional cloud of indicator minerals in the area.

In the five other targets areas, results from the summer sampling program produced several new indicator mineral trains coupled with magnetic anomalies that the company plans to drill over the coming months.