![]() Fipke sorted dirt in homemade backyard machines Marlene dried piles of gravel in the kitchen gas oven. Then, back in the small British Columbia city of Kelowna, they spent half their $12,000 savings to open a business processing mineral samples for prospectors. For seven years he, his wife, Marlene, and their kids bounced through mining outfits in Brazil, New Guinea, Australia, and South Africa. But as a student in the late sixties at the University of British Columbia, he studied geology because he had a young family to support ("With geology you can at least get a job, eh?"). It could change the diamond market-and the wild, isolated Barren Lands-forever.įipke, now 48, once wanted to be an ornithologist. ![]() What they are finding opens a brand- new window on the supersecret world of diamond exploration. In a boulder-strewn sub-Arctic landscape where wolves and caribou roam, 260 companies have staked out 53 million acres drill rigs brought in by helicopter have settled on the tundra like mosquitoes to suck out core samples ore trucks rumble from blasted-out tunnels and whole villages of geologists have sprung up. Now he is sitting on deposits probably worth billions, and Canada may soon be a world-class diamond producer. in geology, an uproarious laugh, and an absentmindedness manifested in perpetually untied shoelaces-had to track clues through the wilderness for a decade and outsmart the pursuing South African De Beers cartel. To find them, Fipke-armed chiefly with a B.S. Yet Fipke and friends have unearthed what may be a whole cluster. Until now, not one major pipe has been discovered in the Western Hemisphere. Rich diamond veins, called pipes, are so difficult to find that only 15 major ones are known, and they're all in Africa, Siberia, and Australia. Once again he was digging ore from the belly of his own personal beast-the innards of an ancient diamond-bearing volcano. Then he dropped it into his battered brown backpack and turned to go. #Diamond rush cracked#With a hammer, he cracked out a fist-size chunk of gray rock, shoved it into the beam of his helmet lamp, and eyeballed it with an intense scowl. ![]() In the rocky Barren Lands of Canada's Northwest Territories, where you can go a thousand miles without seeing a road or tree, Charles Fipke was standing a few months back in ankle-deep mud at the face of a mine 700 feet below the bed of a small lake. ![]()
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