UpHere Magazine Articlein this month's issue, here is an excerpt:
Nunavut: Qirniqtaaluk
Leading up to the creation of Nunavut, Inuit leaders hired geologists to tell them where the most mineral prospective areas were so they could include them as part of their future land claim. Every mine in operation in Nunavut today – along with the majority of the territory’s advanced exploration projects is located on parcels of land where Inuit own surface and subsurface rights.
One exception is Peregrine’s Chidliak diamond project on Baffin Island, halfway between Iqaluit and Pangnirtung. According to Linda Ham, chief geologist with the Canada-Nunavut Geoscience Office, that area was little explored and appeared on maps as a large mass of pink, which denotes granite rock. But Peregrine was curious and took a look at some Geological Survey assessment reports and sediment samples and found what appeared to be good indicator minerals for kimberlite, a diamond bearing rock. “They put a few drillholes down over the area and intersected kimberlites,” she says. “People had no idea that kimberlite could be in that area at all”.
Ham says there really isn’t much “white space” left on the Nunavut map. “There’s no longer big , big areas that we don’t know what the rock type is underneath it.” But there are big swaths of land that are inadequately mapped, like the Chidliak used to be.
One such area, , Qirmiqtaaluk, spans southward from Arctic Bay on the northwestern Baffin Island to the Fury and Hecla Strait, adjacent Iglulik. “It’s a big area of all pink [on the map],” says Ham. “That’s telling us most of that area is all granite. But when you start looking at the aerial photos, we can see there are more rock types there. It’s not granite.