An old story from May of 2003Date : May 19, 2003
High Hopes At New Shoshoni That Its Third Drill Hole Will Hit Another Diamondiferous Kimberlite. As Minews commented last week investor focus is swinging yet again towards Canadian diamond exploration following encouraging news from Northern Empire and Stornoway up in the Melville Peninsular of Nunavut and Ashton followed up quickly with success of its own at Renard. But it was the boys from New Shoshoni who were in London last week and they had an interesting story to tell about diamondiferous kimberlites only a short car or boat ride out of Yellowknife. And that is a crucial part of their story as the Drybones property is less than 50 kms south east of Yellowknife, whereas Canada's two producing mines, Ekati and Diavik in the Lac De Gras region are some 400 kms to the north and the Melville Peninsular is at least another 500 kms north into the arctic. The difference in cost and logistics of operating close to civilisation and way up north is mind boggling. Back in December 2001 New Shoshoni negotiated an option agreement with a Mr David Smith, who, when not prospecting, runs a barge around Great Slave Lake. It was while doing this that his attention was drawn to the possible presence of kimberlites when sheltering in Drybones Bay from a storm on the Lake. He noticed that the water was a lot deeper in the bay than offshore and deduced that the bay, which was very nearly landlocked, could be a depression covering a kimberlite pipe. He proved to be right.The deal struck betweent he company and Mr Smith means that it will have a 100 per cent interest after spending C$1.25 million on exploration over four years and paying Mr Smith, who retains a 2 per cent gross overriding royalty on any production, a modest amount in cash and shares. For this New Shoshoni got a property of about 5,000 acres on the north shore of Great Slave Lake where previous exploration work had identified a diamondiferous kimberlite pipe of approximately 31 hectares (75 acres) in surface area. This made it the largest kimberlite pipe discovered in the Slave Craton and a total of 97 diamonds with a diameter of greater than 0.5 mm had been recovered during testing of a 10.09 tonne sample. In January 2003 New Shoshoni picked up the momentum of exploration by initiating a drill programme to test four geophysical anomalies peripheral to the Drybones Bay kimberlite. These targets are similar sub-circular magnetic anomalies occurring over small, deep depressions and have a lot in common with the geophysical survey results for the known kimberlite. The company already knew that there were kimberlite indicator minerals 'down ice' from the targets and laboratory tests confirmed that these did not come from the known kimberlite. The first hole was terminated before achieving target depth after it hit a kimberlite sill. The second, which was testing a magnetic anomaly half a mile south west of the original kimberlite, hit a new one. The new kimberlite has a green friable ground mass with numerous small and large fragments of both country rock and other exotic rocks. Garnets were noted throughout the examined sections. The core from this second drill hole was shipped to Chuck Fipke's laboratory, CF Mineral Research, for analysis. Chuck Fipke himself knows more than a bit about diamonds having been involved in the discovery of Ekati with Dia Met, but his lab was also chosen because of its high quality control.In the first week of May New Shoshoni announced that the the kimberlite was diamondiferous. The split portion of core sent to CFMR weighed 78 kilogrammes and a total of 128 diamonds were recovered including four macro diamonds which were larger than 500 microns in any dimension. It is still early days, but Mr Fipke himself is said to be very enthusiastic about the chances of this kimberlite proving to be economic to mine. In the meantime the results from the third drillhole are awaited. Apparently kimberlitic indicator minerals could be seen in the core so the chances that it will also prove to be diamondiferous have to be high .It is never wise to make many assumptions in diamond exploration, but it looks as if New Shoshoni is onto something very interesting.