!-- pageType= magazinewide slug= ff_diamonds section= science subsection= planetearth headline= How a Rogue Geologist Discovered a Diamond Trove in the Canadian Arctic authorName= Carl Hoffman creditType= photo credit= Andrew Hetherington caption= Diamond hunter Chuck Fipke with maps of potential new discoveries. -- pBehind an unmarked door in a faded business park outside Kelowna, British Columbia, in a maze of rooms crowded with desks, computers, and floor-to-ceiling shelves, Chuck Fipke sifts through 20-pound bags of dirt./p p"We take samples, hey, from gravel and streambeds all over the world," Fipke says. He sieves the earth, runs it through magnetic drums and centrifuges and electromagnetic separators. Then his technicians, working with scanning electron microscopes, separate out grains and mount them on postage-stamp-sized squares of epoxy. It's painstaking work but worth the trouble. Fipke has learned to understand those grains of dirt, and that understanding has led him to diamonds./p pEighteen years ago, there was no such thing as a Canadian diamond mdash; as far as anyone knew. Diamonds came mostly from Australia, Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, and Russia. De Beers mined 75 percent of the world's output, much of it tainted by controversial "a href="http://www.un.org/peace/africa/Diamond.html"blood diamonds/a," sold to fund African wars./p div id="embed" div id="pic"img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_ice2_f.jpg" alt="" / div id="caption"Stones from the Ekati Mine.br / emPhoto: Andrew Hetherington/em/div /div /div pToday, Canada is the world's third-largest producer, by value, of rough stones. In the Northwest Territories, a href="http://www.bhpbilliton.com/"BHP Billiton/a's Ekati a href="http://www.bhpbilliton.com/bb/ourBusinesses/diamondsSpecialtyProducts/ekatiDiamondMine.jsp"mine/a has been producing since 1998 and Rio Tinto's a href="http://www.diavik.ca/"Diavik mine/a since 2003. De Beers opened its first Canadian mine, at Snap Lake, in July mdash; a confirmation that Canada is the new center of the world./p pThe story behind the addition of Canada to the ranks of diamond-producing nations leads back to one man: a short, absentminded Canadian geologist named Chuck Fipke. When he discovered diamonds in a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac_de_Gras"Lac de Gras/a, Northwest Territories, in 1991, he started the largest staking rush in North America since a href="http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=Articleid=4614"George Carmack/a found gold in the Klondike a century earlier. And he's not finished: He's prospecting around the world, toting gravel samples back to his lab in British Columbia to figure out where to look for his next big strike./p pstrongIn 1970, fresh out of/strong the University of British Columbia with a degree in geology, Chuck Fipke signed on with mining company a href="http://www.kennecott.com/"Kennecott Copper/a to look for gold and copper in Papua New Guinea. A helicopter would drop him off alone in the middle of a jungle, and pick him up at the end of the day. The terrain was so rough that the chopper often couldn't land mdash; Fipke would just leap out as it hovered close to the ground. One day he turned around to face 20 locals, arrows strung. He raised his arms, slowly removed his vest, and offered it to "the one who looked like the chief." By the time the helo returned for him, Fipke was in his underpants clutching a fine array of tribal shields, bows and arrows, and fetishes. "I've got an amazing collection of stuff!" he says./p pFipke is a small man with a shaved head, a burnished tan, piercing blue eyes, and forearms like Popeye's. As a kid, his frantic start-stop mind made people think he was stupid. After getting his high school girlfriend pregnant, he agreed to marry her ... and then failed to show up for the wedding. (The couple eventually married after the baby was born.) He stutters and says "hey" in almost every sentence. He frequently loses his glasses and his keys, shows up late to appointments, and has a history of spending prodigious amounts of money in strip joints. His nicknames have included Captain Chaos and Stumpy./p pAfter stints in the Amazon, Australia, and South Africa, Fipke opened a mineral separation laboratory in British Columbia in 1977. A year later, a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_Oil_Company"Superior Oil/a hired him to go back into the field mdash; to look not for metals but gems./p !-- pagebreak -- div class="wide_img"img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_ice3_f.jpg" alt="" div class="wide_caption"div class="wide_caption_txt"The wilderness around Snap Lake, in Canada's Northwest Territories, conceals a trove of diamonds.br / emPhoto: Andrew Hetherington/em/div/div/div br/br/ pThe company already had a search method. A couple of years prior, a geologist named a href="http://web.uct.ac.za/depts/geolsci/people/staff/johng.htm"John Gurney/a, working with Superior's money at the University of Cape Town, hypothesized that certain common minerals might reliably form alongside diamonds. He used an electron microprobe to analyze geological structures called a href="http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/diamonds/kimberlite.html"kimberlite pipes/a mdash; the places you occasionally (but not often) find diamonds mdash; and discovered that the presence of chromite, ilmenite, and high-chrome, low-calcium garnet did indeed predict a rich strike. He examined a host of pipes in South Africa that had these so-called indicator minerals and published a paper explaining his results./p div id="embed" div id="pic"img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_diamonds_map_250.jpg" alt="" / div id="caption"The Snap Lake site is one of four diamond mines established in Canada in recent years.br / emIllustration: Bryan Christie/em/div /div /div pFipke heard about Gurney's work on a tour of De Beers' a href="http://www.mining-technology.com/projects/finsch/"Finsch Mine/a in South Africa and quickly turned himself into an expert on indicator minerals mdash; combining what he understood of Gurney's work with results coming out of Russian labs and his own skills with field sampling. Superior had worked with Fipke before, back in his gold mining days, so by the time the company wanted someone to go look for kimberlite pipes northwest of Fort Collins, Colorado, Fipke was the best choice. He found half a dozen, but like 98 percent of the kimberlite formations in the world, they didn't contain diamonds in commercially viable quantities./p pBut Fipke knew that, 100 miles under those pipes, was a craton, a thick, old chunk of continental plate where diamonds form. Kimberlite pipes are created when magma bubbles up through a craton, expanding and cooling on its way up. If the craton has diamonds in it, the result is either a carrot-shaped, diamond-studded pipe reaching up to the surface or a wide, flat underground structure called a dike./p pFipke also knew that the craton underneath the pipes he had found ran all the way up the Rockies. With Superior's backing, he teamed up with a geologist and pilot named Stewart Blusson, formed a href="http://www.diamet.com/"Dia Met Minerals/a, and headed north./p pBy 1981, the two men were sampling the ground in Canada; they would eventually secure mining concessions on 80,000 square miles. "It was just me and Sewart and a floatplane," Fipke says. "We took all the supplies and all the samples in ourselves."/p pDe Beers geologists, it turned out, were already there, relying on their own indicator mineral formulas. But Fipke and Blusson surmised that the indicators De Beers found had in fact been dragged far from the kimberlite pipe eons ago by a passing glacier. What they needed to do was look "upstream" for the point of origin. Fipke got a helicopter and flew back and forth over the Arctic Circle, using a magnetometer to track variations in magnetic field that would suggest kimberlite. After thousands of miles and hundreds of hours in the air, he found a promising site near Lac de Gras, a barren world of lakes and rock and muskeg a few hundred miles outside the Arctic Circle./p pHe'd been surveying for eight years. He hadn't found a single diamond. Superior had abandoned the diamond business. Dia Met's stock was trading at pennies a share. But based upon a few samples, Fipke estimated a diamond concentration at Lac de Gras of more than 60 carats per 100 tons mdash; with about a quarter of the stones of good quality or better. (In kimberlite pipes that have gem-quality stones in commercial quantities, a concentration of 1 carat mdash; 0.2 grams mdash; per 100 tons can be profitable.) After six months of sampling, Fipke went public. It was 1991, and he had found a kimberlite pipe (buried under 30 feet of glaciated sediment) with a concentration of 68 carats per 100 tons mdash; the first Canadian diamonds ever found. Shares of Dia Met rocketed to $70. Fipke had partnered with mining giant Broken Hill Proprietary Company (now BHP Billiton) to get the diamonds out; BHP opened the Ekati mine at Lac de Gras in 1998. Soon Dia Met's 29 percent share of the mine was worth billions. Fipke would go on to sell his chunk to BHP for $687 million, retaining 10 percent ownership in the mine, worth another $1 billion./p pToday Canada's diamond business is soaring. The country's four working mines produced 17 million carats in 2007, up 23 percent from 2006. Diamonds from Canada now account for 10 percent of all diamonds by carat sold in the world. And the addition of more diamonds to the global market hasn't driven prices down. Average carat value has actually risen 15 percent, and the gems from the far north are untainted by the bad publicity that comes from an association with African wars./p pShortly before Fipke sold most of his Ekati claim to BHP Billiton, his marriage, faltering for years after so much time in the field, fell apart. At the time it was the a href="http://www.nnsl.com/frames/newspapers/2000-02/feb28_00dia.html"largest divorce settlement/a in Canadian history. "Cost me $200 million, hey," Fipke says. "Best money I ever spent!"/p pstrongFipke now has mining/strong projects in Morocco, Greenland, Canada, Angola, and Brazil. His laboratory bookshelves are heavy with mineral guides mdash; and the family histories of thoroughbreds. Besides diamonds, he's now obsessed with horse racing. "It's a huge challenge, hey, and I like challenges even if they're risky," he says. "And I think I'm really going to do spectacularly well with horses." So far, so good: He has more than 50 brood mares in Ireland and Kentucky and 20 racehorses all over the world. His horse a href="http://www.kentuckyderby.com/2008/contenders/tale-ekati"Tale of Ekati/a placed fifth in this year's Kentucky Derby. "I always go to the Derby with Bo Derek," he says, unlocking the door to a windowless room piled with maps and electron microscopes and computers. "She's a good rider, and she knows horses. And she's a lot of fun, hey! I'm gonna do for horse racing what I did for diamonds!"/p !-- pagebreak -- div class="wide_img"img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_diamonds_debeers_630.jpg" alt="" div class="wide_caption"div class="wide_caption_txt"The De Beers mine at Snap Lake is a labyrinth of crushers and separators. br/ emPhoto: Andrew Hetherington/em/div/div/divbr/br/ pWhether or not Fipke actually turns out to have an eye for horseflesh, his eye for the characteristics of crystals is unparalleled. He shows me rooms of glass flasks and tubes, the equipment for analyzing all those gravel samples. I peek through a microscope and see a rainbow treasure of sparkling gems: green chrome diopsides and red garnets mdash; the low-calcium, high-chrome G-10s that mean diamonds are nearby./p pOver many years in the field and the lab, Fipke has refined his understanding of this unique stew of minerals. "Everyone now knows that G-10 garnets with low calcium might lead you to diamonds, hey," Fipke says. "But how do you distinguish between a Group 1 eclogitic garnet that grew with a diamond and a Group 2 eclogitic garnet that didn't? They look the same." Custom software compares the grains' shapes and chemical compositions, analyzes them against 1,000 minerals that are intergrown with diamonds, and compares them against 10 fields of mineral groupings. If seven to 10 of the fields from one pipe overlap, Fipke says, "there's no doubt; it's full of diamonds. No one else out there can distinguish between these similar tiny particles of minerals that grow with a diamond and ones that don't."/p div id="embed" div id="pic"img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_ice5_f.jpg" alt="" / div id="caption"Miners prepare to blow up a rock face.br / emPhoto: Andrew Hetherington/em /div /div /div p"Look," he says, opening a folder on a table. He has thousands of photos of mineral grains magnified to the size of golf balls. Some are all sharp corners and jagged edges, some rounded. Since erosion and age wear the minerals down, "we can tell when we're getting closer to the source. If the edges are sharp, hey, we know they haven't traveled far from the pipe."/p pThat level of geographic precision has allowed Fipke to stake more claims. He's even working in areas of Brazil where De Beers hasn't been able to turn a profit. "And Angola. Angola has the richest alluvial diamond river in the world," he says, "and there are thousands of diamond works there. But we're looking for the source pipes." Five years ago Fipke started making magnetometer survey flights over the a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwango_River"Kwango River/a. Having identified 100 possible targets, he now has 40 men taking core samples 900 to 1,200 feet under the riverbed. "I'm there at the camp at least three times a year, hey, and it's much harder than in the Arctic. Your drilling equipment just gets buried in enormous piles at customs in Luanda and you can't get it. In the Northwest Territories it was cold, hey, and full of snow, but you get a good parka and you're a bug in a rug. Angola is the most inefficient place on earth!"/p pI start to ask another question, but Fipke has something else in mind. "I'm hungry, hey," he barks, as the door to the map room slams shut behind us. "Do you like oysters?" But we're not going anywhere: He has locked his keys in the room and has to call someone to drive in and open up his office./p pWe finally head into town. "Hi, Chuck!" says the hostess, leading us to the back room of a hip Asian fusion place. Around a long table sit 23 young women, all sporting stilettos and big hair. "Chuck!" they shout. We have, it seems, shown up at the bachelorette party for Fipke's granddaughter. The hostess seats us at the next table. Fipke orders four dozen oysters and a bottle of wine that has to be driven to the restaurant from some special cellar, and a young women shimmies into the booth next to Fipke. "Chuck," she says, kissing him on the cheek, "do you think you can pay for us all tonight?"/p p"Sure," Fipke says, beaming./p p"Do you remember this?" says another woman mdash; his daughter, it turns out, who slides in next to him, holding up a purse. "You bought it for me!"/p pWith Fipke suddenly bankrolling the night, the girls break loose, and the restaurant staff starts hauling out the bottles of champagne. Pretty soon a couple of lasses are dancing on the tables, the oysters are slipping down, a second bottle of rare wine is being decanted, and Fipke is remixing the menu like Danny DeVito in ema href="http://www.imdb.com/Title?0113161"citeGet Shorty/cite/a/em./p pAnd the tales spill forth: three week forays into the Peruvian Amazon, travels with the Kalahari Bushmen of Southern Africa, visits to the pygmies of the Ituri forest in the Congo. "I'd just leave my family and go, hey," he says. "I was really into native culture."/p pSomebody asks him about Brazil, and it reminds him of something important. "Caipirinhas!" he shouts out of the blue. "I want 25 caipirinhas!"/p pWhen the bill arrives, it's 3 feet long and $4,000. Fipke pays up, and we spill into the night mdash; his daughter and granddaughter and their friends and now boyfriends, who joined us in the restaurant. On the street, Fipke suddenly leaps into the air and delivers a solid, suede loafer-clad foot to the head of a parking meter. "I fucking hate parking meters, hey!" he shouts. He jumps and kicks another one, and then erupts into a fit of giggles./p pWe are ushered past the velvet rope at the Cheetah Lounge, Kelowna's classiest strip joint, and Captain Chaos orders another round of caipirinhas for everyone. Three generations of Fipkes pound drinks as naked women dangle upside down from poles onstage./p pThe room is spinning by the time Fipke takes me aside and lays a big warm hand on my arm. "Hey," he says, "here's the thing. I learned that I did my best. I mean, I really tried my best. How many people can say that? I worked hard, and I mean really hard. I worked seven days a week from 8 am until 3 am. Every day. We drilled and drilled all winter when it was dark and the windchill was 80 below. Everyone thought I was crazy. But most people just never do their best, hey. And I did."/p pemContributing editor Carl Hoffman /em(a href="mailto:carlhoffmn@earthlink.net"carlhoffmn@earthlink.net/a) emwrote about the private space company SpaceX in issue 15.06./em/pbr style="clear: both;"/ a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:0627ce3c3b6ae327e5f06dd2f229cc5e:%2FfMZEsh%2BwKLICU5UU6f2XvNPdawcsXbrPL0IgcNmb1HkbkovTIq34grsdoe%2FarsA5BIV0olmUO5vOg%3D%3D'img border='0' title='Add to Facebook' alt='Add to Facebook' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/facebook.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:f6c60dd504b07078bdbc6b09258399fa:z9re7O%2Fr9g7IWr4dUnV7qrGpZcrb8Jda0z5wA4Ind8sbvwvuCjEcWeHZ3OMoIQ2%2FlAqrQu%2BxQ%2Fwj'img border='0' title='Add to Reddit' alt='Add to Reddit' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/reddit.png'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:eabae8e0f643b5c7f7a103cea954fefd:B7poPN8AgcPsLABfHqfLdvTArLYNDoIDfq7hJXfovsGgeK1C%2FXxzP9gLrcWMNRJZSzyblLz%2BiS6g'img border='0' title='Add to digg' alt='Add to digg' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/digg.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:3669b8286376e46e06956252ef17c5b1:cfCGfTXzx74lBKekrETCStAWLWyBnGkD8fTmyGqiNQWrC6%2FmqUtSmWQQxfC2zORnD6oE0JLZc9DD'img border='0' title='Add to Google' alt='Add to Google' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/google.png'//a br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=aee47be5de030b69470388cf099ed063p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=aee47be5de030b69470388cf099ed063p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=aee47be5de030b69470388cf099ed063" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/ pa href="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?a=IAu4eH"img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?i=IAu4eH" border="0"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~4/472101281" height="1" width="1"/

Some bit of not so bad news: Thailand’s tourism authorities have issued a list of hotels offering accommodation for stranded passengers. A special flight was arranged for Thai Muslim pilgrims to their annual Haj pilgrimage to Mecca. Foreign governments are making extra efforts to help their citizens.

As of this writing, the airport crisis is still not over. Dozens of empty planes were allowed to leave Bangkok, but protesters still control the two major airports in Thailand.

There are three protest centers in Thailand: The two airports and the Government House. The People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), the organizer of the protests, has decided to leave the Government House after a grenade blast inside the complex injured scores of protesters last Saturday. PAD will now focus in maintaining its control of the airports. Will police allow PAD members to join their comrades in the two airports?

What is the solution to the crisis? A human rights group asks Parliament to convene an emergency session. There are rumors that a court will issue a decision which would not be favorable to the ruling party.

Oak Monster's Den also heard this rumor:

“Rumors abound that tomorrow (Tuesday) the court will dissolve the current majority political party and therefore sack the PM. Then a coup will follow to mop up the mess, disperse the airport crowd. Then an interim governement. Then election. The Red Shirts aren’t going to like it but that’s the only way to solve the stand off, in my opinion.”

Tourists are able to leave the country through U-tapao airport. This is very far from Bangkok. The situation there is chaotic:

“U-tapao is packed. Traffic is backed up. Tourists are spilled all over the parking lot, lugging their luggage in from the streets. This 1960-built former U.S. airforce base during Vietnam War has only one luggage scanner. A Thai-blog reader contacted me to said that he tried to “drop in” on U-tapao and it was a total nightmare. Anyone heading out should allow themselves a LOT of time to get there and to go through the maze of lines and put up with lots of characters.”

Portable toilet in U-Tapao airport. See the crowded room inside the airport. Photos from Falling Into You

What is the situation inside the airport blockade? Apparently, passports are no longer needed to enter the airport. Individuals only need to bring a yellow scarf (the color of protest) or a PAD clapper (see video below this article). There was an American tourist who spoke in the PAD program.

Protesters are preparing for a final showdown with the police. They claim they will use human shields to block the police. Bangkok Pundit reports:

“I should note that there is a large number of children at the rallies. What responsible parent would bring their children to a rally knowing there is a possibility of violence? Money is certainly one reason.”

Pro-government rallies are also being held in central Bangkok. Red is the chosen color of government supporters. ~Meaw & More~ visited the pro-government rally and observes:

1. Music, was not as good as PAD
2. I have not seen anyone offered anyone’s money in return. We have been offered a meal in plastic bag, which was not bad, some red banner.

Note
1. The crowd as we saw today are, according to external appearance and some chat, mainly Bangkokians middle class. Some even bother to dress as Santa.
2. Foreign photographers and journalists did not wear bullet proof vests like at PAD.

PAD is vilified by almost everybody outside Thailand. Here is a different opinion on PAD:

“I can say that in all my visits to the PAD rallies, they are not a mob but a predominantly peaceful and respectful group that wants to see a new dimension in Thai politics. While visiting red shirt rallies, while most were genuine, I was approached twice by thugs carrying machetes and steel pipes threatening to beat me if I take pictures.”

An Englishman reminds media to review the kind of democracy which exists in Thailand:

“Just don’t be too hasty to pass judgement on the PAD when the Western media states they are against democracy, because, Thailand's democracy works differently to ours.”

The Prime Minister is trapped in northeast Thailand. Frogblog Thaidings witnessed a government rally in that part of the country”

“Spend a few hours in their presence and you soon end up with a completely different impression. These are people that are genuinely worried about the possibility of their democratic right to vote being taken away.

“They are disgusted by PAD's antics in Bangkok, and the occupation of the airports there in particular. They appreciate the damage being done both to Thailand's reputation and to its economy. Many of them live in borderline poverty, so the slightest set-back can leave them struggling to survive on a day-to-day basis. They feel insulted and degraded by the suggestion that they are simply too stupid and lacking in education to vote for the right reasons.”

He was referring to the proposal of PAD to modify the method of choosing the country’s leaders since they think the poor do not vote wisely during elections.

Photo from Frogblogger

The airport crisis in Thailand is affecting other countries too. A tourist decided to enter Thailand by traveling from Singapore by land. Bangkok Dazed adds:

“Obviously the Bangkok Airport situation is affecting other countries in the region as well. If any tourists want to travel to Myanmar, for example, the Bangkok airport is the main gateway. Over in Siem Reap, Cambodia, several of my friends have sent e-mails this week; concerned about my safety in Bangkok, and also worried about a dropoff in tourism over there. My friend Rong works at the airport in Siem Reap and tells me there hasn’t been much to do all week.”