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           In early July 1994, I traveled to the tundra of Canada's Northwest Territories to report on the discovery of a huge field of potential diamond mines there. My destination was that vast region known as the Barren Lands, the uninhabited edge of North America that lies beyond the regions where trees exist. Here the small-time prospector Charles Fipke and several partners had tracked down the remains of a single ancient volcano under the surface of a tiny, unnamed circular lake. Deep in the rocks were 81 tiny diamonds.
      This sparked one of the greatest mining rushes in history. The only road was hundreds of miles south, within treeline, but hundreds of companies homed in with aircraft, staking claims larger than whole countries. The claims ringed the discovery site, near the shore of the huge Lac de Gras, or Ekati, as it is called by the Dene Indians. In English both names mean Fat Lake. Some aboriginal elders say it refers to the abundant smell of caribou fat burning in campfires during long-ago fall hunts there. Others say it is for the white quartz veins lacing the crystalline rocks along the shore, which resemble veins of that same fat.
      Lac de Gras rattled the diamond world hard. Diamond mines are so difficult to uncover, decades may pass between the finding of one and another. A single discovery can be worth $70 billion, so the few who know the arcane methods of diamond prospecting guard them well. The South African de Beers cartel has run most of these mines since the 19th century, and it was here like everyone else of course, frantically deploying drills, instruments, computers and geologists. So far they hadn't found a thing: Fipke had beat them to the diamonds, as the Fipkes of the world almost always do. It is only afterward that the cartel usually takes over, but this time it was not clear if they could.
      Fipke was an unlikely diamond magnate: nearsighted, goateed, short and tough as an oak stump, his speech jolted by a stutter and a hair-trigger laugh. He often forgot to tie his shoes, and had other absentminded-professor mannerisms, though without benefit of the fancy degrees supposed to attend absentminded professorship. His main assets were steady industry, endless optimism and his family. His main partner, an ascetic loner named Stewart Blusson, was equally unlikely. Blusson, recently of the elite Geological Survey of Canada, did have a PhD., and a license to fly helicopters--both great assets in the north, where there is much rock and no roads. Wiry, weathered, quiet and intense, Blusson was a wilderness survivor par excellence, but always brushing just a little too close to death. Among other scars, he carried a grizzly-claw mark on his left arm from his years in the Yukon. When these two found something, it threatened to change everything--the diamond market, the Barren Lands, themselves.
      When I first heard of the strike, I was fascinated. There was a small stack of books about the cartel's supposed dark manipulations of the diamond market--but nothing on how prospectors actually locate diamonds. There were whole shelves on polar explorers--but little on the obscure Barren Lands, where the North American arctic begins. Finally, among old papers, I discovered a secret saga: prospectors had sought a North American diamond mine for 450 years, from Arkansas to the islands of the Arctic Ocean. Fipke and Blusson had spiritual ancestors, all working in the same direction, whether they knew it or not. So, I decided to write the story of how mineral hunters--eventually these diamond hunters--arrived at the literal edge of the earth. It takes shape in the south over many years and miles. Then, like an old prospector seeking new frontiers, it turns north.

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      I first met Charles Fipke at his lab in the small city of Kelowna, British Columbia, which lies about 200 miles northeast of Seattle, Washington. No one in Kelowna calls him Charles, not even his parents. He's just Chuck. Friendly and unassuming, Chuck told me bits and pieces of how he and his crew had explored snaky brushlands, edges of glaciers, tops of high, crumbly precipices and other places normal people don't go. Then he offered to show off his big find.
      A few days later we were on a commercial jet to Yellowknife, NWT. This is the jump-off point to the Barren Lands, a lone frontier town of 13,000 souls hammered into the bare rocks of the forest at the gravel dead-end of the South and North American road systems. A hundred miles further, trees stop, tundra begins. The name Yellowknife comes from the Yellowknives, a tiny group of Dene said to have once possessed a mysterious mine far out on the tundra. Aside from Indians and government officials, its population is mostly immigrant prospectors and related folk. It lies about 1,800 miles northeast--mostly north--of Seattle.
      On the flight up, we passed over hours of wilderness: the north-south continental cordillera, which runs from Guatemala nearly to the northern ocean, its ranges upon ranges of barren peaks frozen forever under glaciers and icy tarns; then the swampy, undernourished boreal forests that form the deep buffer between the treeless arctic and the populated south. The slender road to Yellowknife, intermittently visible far below, was the sole sign of human penetration. Finally we overflew an enormous wind-whipped water, Great Slave Lake, to whose north shore Yellowknife clings.
      When we arrived it was near midnight, but the sun still hung on the horizon in that peculiar, spooky twilight of the far northern summer. After a few hours' sleep we went down to Air Tindi, a charter outfit with a lakeside float-plane dock, and squeezed into a de Havilland Twin Otter alongside a cargo of diesel drums. In a land one-third covered with lakes, ponds, creeks and marshes, float planes, and helicopters, are the only way to travel. In winter the airplane pilots trade floats for skis. The Otter revved up, wafted off and we turned north once more.
      Soon the spruces below looked ever hungrier, like rejected Christmas trees. They began to spread out and keep distance from one other. Big bare spots opened, where whalebacks of naked bedrock reared up and plunged into ponds. Then along a jagged, invisible edge, we passed treeline. Below was a mosaic of stone, splashed with uncountable lakes and parallel watery striations stretching to the horizon. The Barrens form an immense triangle bounded south by the trees, north by the continental coast; east by Hudson Bay, and west by the woods at the foot of the high cordillera--roughly 500,000 square miles. No feature rises more than a few hundred feet; it is made of the world's oldest rocks, and they are simply wearing out.
      Around 16,000 B.C. the last continental ice sheet receded from its southern limit near Exit 10 on the New Jersey Turnpike (Metuchen), but did not finish melting up here until about 4000 B.C. Jumbles of car-size boulders still lie where ice dropped them, and raw dykes of surviving igneous bedrock jut like rows of fairy castles. There are eskers--great, sinuous ridges of sand and gravel left by watercourses that once ran within the ice. Hundreds of feet high, hundreds of miles long, they are leveled on top with beachy sand, and look eerily manmade, like interstate highways. The land is still frozen from the top to 1,500 feet down. There is little rain or snow, so it is technically desert; water lies everywhere only because permafrost, low relief and lack of river systems defeat its movement. There is a term for this: deranged drainage. With nothing to block wind, wind blows most of the time. Winters hit 90 degrees below zero F. Lakes freeze six feet thick, rendering the land "more a place of physics than biology," as one bush pilot put it. Deep rock cracks disguised by snow can swallow human or animal in an instant. When things thaw for brief summer, caribou migrate up from the trees, grizzlies wake from an eight-month torpor, and the land hatches a blaze of blueberries and enough biting insects to eat the planet. In this beautiful season, a bolt of lightning may come from the vast sky and strike you dead. All this is why it is called the Barren Lands.
      By some definitions, the Arctic Circle marks the start of true north. At 66 degrees, 32 minutes, it is the latitude above which the sun never sets on at least one summer day, and on one winter day never rises. But it is the irregular treeline, which waves both above and below the invisible Circle, that is the actual boundary. That is where weather patterns change abruptly, and familiar creatures like coyotes and amphibians disappear. Plants and human history bend into strange shapes. The world as most know it ends.
      Like some other sojourners of the 20th and 21st centuries, I have always been deeply saddened by the journals of explorers like Meriwether Lewis. In the early 1800s, Lewis crossed east over the treeless Great Plains of the American West, looking for the Pacific Ocean. He wrote in September 1804: "Vast herds of Buffaloe deer Elk and Antilopes were seen feeding in every direction as far as the eye of the observer could reach." Of wolves, he noted, "We scarcely see a gang of buffaloe without observing a parsel of these faithfull shepherds on their skirts in readiness." Along the dry bed of the Medicine River Lewis glimpsed what seemed a mythical combination of wolf and wildcat--probably a wolverine, a real beast now long extinguished almost everywhere in North America. Meriwether Lewis, I thought, was among the last to witness such miracles, now hunted down, plowed up, paved over.
      I believed this until shortly after the Twin Otter landed. Four days later after midnight, with the moon sitting low on one horizon and the sun on the other, I crept up the flanks of a great esker, peered over and saw the migratory Bathurst caribou herd moving back to the trees, newborn calves in tow. The adults' great velvety horns swarmed like giant puppets in the air 10 feet from a boulder behind which I cowered. Then they flowed around me on both sides, stretching as far as the eye could see to all points of God's compass. Except for the popping of tens of thousands of leg joints and the occasional clatter of a hoof knocking over a stone, the land was silent. Out of the twilight a single brown wolf trotted calmly over a rise and headed for an old bull.
       The Barrens have never really been lived upon, only traveled through; the wolverine, an eater of the dead, is almost its only year-round resident. For millennia Dene living in the shelter of the trees followed in with their mainstay, the caribou in, but always retreated with their quarry. The Inuit, or Eskimos, living off the resources of the sea on the tundra's opposite end, also entered to hunt the caribou, then retreated. The center, remote from sea or trees, was no-man's land. Now nomadic peoples have retreated for good, and Europeans have never replaced them. Only the stone tent rings and spearheads of the ancients are left, scattered along the eskers where they traveled, camped and hunted. Among the Dene, only a few dwindling elders remember Hosi--the treeless land--and the names of lakes, hills and "dreaming places," where terrible visions will appear to anyone who dares sleep on them. Aerial photography has sketched in blank areas, but cartographers have attached names to few features, and there is little real knowledge of what is there. When I arrived biologists were still studying the journal of young Samuel Hearne, the first--and still one of the only--Europeans to cross the Barrens. The years of his journey were 1769 to 1772.
      Hearne was the original Barren Lands prospector; and for reasons that soon will be apparent, most of his European successors in this region have been prospectors too, hunting gold, uranium and other treasures. Hearne happened to be seeking a fabulous copper mine, but his trail, laced with bloody footprints and stalked by massacre, never led to it. Others have failed out here too. That is why, unlike most aboriginal people, the Dene have never come up with a word for "white persons." They refer to outsiders as kwet'i--rock people--after the inexplicable thing they all seem to be hunting.
      However, until Fipke and Blusson showed up, the search for diamonds never penetrated here. It was instead going on far south, and with great gusto. Canadians and Americans have long been enthralled by diamonds. Americans became the world's leading importers in the mid-1800s, a fact that has never changed since. Almost every year Americans set a new record, and now buy one third of the world's diamonds--far more than anyone else. Canada, with one-tenth the population, would hold this honor if only it had more people. Eight of ten Canadian women own one or more pieces of diamond jewelry, making Canadians the earth's top per capita diamond consumers.
      In search of a domestic supply, hundreds of individuals and companies in both countries have vied for the big strike. Often they have been so overanxious, there is a long rap sheet of places where land promoters, stock-sellers and assorted swindlers have made fortunes on nonexistent deposits. Maps are pocked with the results: Diamond Canyon, Diamond Butte and Diamond Peak, Arizona; Diamond Field Draw, Colorado; Diamond Mountain, Utah; Diamond Hill, Rhode Island; Diamond Crater, Oregon; the Diamond Range and Diamond Valley, Nevada; the Diamond Mountains, California; Diamond Basin, Idaho; Cap aux Diamants, Quebec; assorted Diamond gulches, creeks, islands and springs; and a dozen towns with the word Diamond. There are quartz "Herkimer diamonds" from upstate New York; "Rock Springs diamonds" from Illinois; and "Cape May diamonds" from the Jersey shore.
      The search is stoked by more than mirage: genuine diamonds have in fact turned up all over North America, and many strange stories are connected with them.
      In the summer of 1886, 12-year-old Willie Christie of Dysartville, in rural northeastern North Carolina, was sent to a farm spring to fetch a pail of water. As he sat down on a box by the spring, he saw a translucent stone shining up at him from two feet away. Thinking it "a pretty trick," he took it and showed it around at the local grocery store. Eventually it was mailed to the great American gem expert George Frederick Kunz, a self-taught mineralogist from Hoboken, New Jersey, who later played a pivotal role in the search. Kunz confirmed it was a diamond, "a distorted and twinned hexoctahedron, of 4 1/3 carats, transparent, with a grayish-green tint." The facets formed a tiny spider-web pattern. Kunz bought it for $150, and for decades it was prominently displayed at the American Museum of Natural History. Its whereabouts are now unknown; like so many other old American stones, it is lost. But that is another story.
      In April 1928, 12-year-old William P. "Punch" Jones of Peterstown, West Virginia, was playing horseshoes with his dad, Grover, in the yard. Punch's toss hit the stake and kicked a glassy fragment from the dirt. "See, I found a diamond!" he joked. Later, Punch became briefly famous, but not for this. His mother, Grace, set the world's record for consecutive male births--Punch was eldest of 17 kids--and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt hosted Grover Jones Family Day at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Punch kept the fragment in a cigar box until June 1943, when he mailed it to a Virginia geology professor. At 34.46 carats, it was the second largest known North American diamond; the Smithsonian Institution displayed it. Shortly after, Punch joined the U.S. Army and was promptly killed in combat in Germany. Afterward his mother grew sick of hearing about the famous "Punch Jones Diamond." "I wish they'd a threw it in the New River sometimes," she said. In the 1960s the family asked the Smithsonian to return the stone, then stored it in a safe-deposit box at First Valley National Bank. In 1984, Sotheby's of New York sold it for them to an anonymous investor in Asia.
      In summer 1990, Ms. Darlene Dennis was jogging on a gravel road just after dawn, a quarter-mile from her home outside Craig, Montana. In the gravel she spied what appeared to be a clear, melted plastic coat button. A jeweler in Great Falls identified it: 14 carats, nearly flawless. The jeweler mentioned it to New York antiques dealer Alexander Acevedo, who knocked on Dennis's door and wrote her an $80,000 check for the stone, which he dubbed the Lewis and Clark Diamond. It was four times the normal price, but it was American, and thus, he felt, extra-valuable. Acevedo extracted the find location from her, then secretly crawled for hours on the road, in a nearby riverbed, and in a gravel pit, looking for more. He received extreme sunburn and, some time later, a bad skin cancer on his nose. I visited Acevedo one afternoon in 1999 at his Madison Avenue gallery. He sat me down on an expensive old couch and let me heft the rough stone in my hand. It is real.
      Real diamonds of more than 2 carats also have been found in the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, California, Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming, Washington, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and in the province of Ontario. Smaller stones, plus unverified finds, are reported from Alaska, Maryland, New York, South Carolina, Kentucky, New Mexico, Arizona, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec and British Columbia.
      Each new random find sparks prospecting ventures, but all face the same problem: systematic, scientific searches in the same places rarely yield more stones, nor clues to the origins. In fact, as the above stories suggest, many discoverers are children, the world's luckiest gem prospectors: full of energy, eyes built close to the ground, happy to pick up any piece of dirty junk, not looking for anything particular. Only one consistent clue has emerged. A definite swath has turned up in terminal moraines left by the last glaciation--the outer edges of the northern ice.
       Now, if there is one thing Americans and Canadians both love, it is the idea of the one-mule prospector heading out to find the motherlode. The California 49ers; the Klondike; unbathed men with names like Swiftwater Bill, Skookum Jim, Lucky Swede; tales of lost mines and headless skeletons found sitting in lonesome miners' cabins--in these two nations whose economies and outlooks are founded on minerals, yarns about prospectors are the quintessential folklore. But these are almost always stories about gold and silver. When was the last time you heard one about diamond hunters?

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      Diamonds are infinitely rarer than gold or silver. They are, technically, a mineral--a naturally occurring solid with a more or less predictable chemical formula and crystalline structure. Quartz and mica are minerals; most rocks, agglomerations of minerals. Diamond, like the mineral graphite, is made of the single element carbon, but rearranged by heat and pressure into a lattice totally different--supremely lustrous, hard and heavy. Meteorite craters in Arizona and Siberia contain diamonds crystallized from the high-pressure inferno of the impact; some may have even have arrived inside the meteorites, from space. Below earth, they may form when tectonic plates collide and one block of crust is shoved under another. The submerged block gets squeezed, then later refolded up and up, like a seed squishing out of a peach, until it is at the top of a mountain. There are diamondiferous peaks in eastern China, the Tibetan Himalayas and northern Kazakhstan. Diamonds may travel from unimaginable depths; geologists recently found some on the southwest Pacific island of Malaita in an eruptive rock called alnöite, thought to have come up 500 miles. No one knows the depth limit, if any.
      However, the above diamonds are generally sparse, ugly and microscopic. The ones prospectors want--big, clear and concentrated in minable quantities--are the ones in our story. We should not pretend we know exactly how they form; ideas change from time to time. But lab scientists have analyzed minerals found alongside diamonds; broken down separate minerals encased inside (flaws, or "inclusions"); and synthesized diamonds themselves. As a result, we believe most gem-quality stones come from below the nuclei of continents, earth's most ancient, stable regions, called cratons. It is said they form 75 to 125 miles down, in a "diamond stability zone" of 1700 to 2300 degrees Fahrenheit, at 45,000 to 60,000 atmospheres, in two rock types, eclogite and peridotite. The carbon source is probably primordial fluids, gases or semisolids--nothing as pedestrian as the proverbial hunk of coal, which would get down that far. Crystallization may take a second or 10 million years; we do not know. Crystals may be stored for eons; some have been dated at 3.3 billion years, more than three-quarters of earth's history.
      Diamonds form mainly under cratons because under much of the rest of earth, the geothermal gradient is too high; that is, as depth increases, temperature goes up too steeply. Most of the near-surface has been ravaged repeatedly by diamond-unfriendly melting events--rifts, plumes, volcanoes, continental collisions. As a result the lithosphere, the stiff, congealed stuff of tectonic plates floating over earth's hot, gooey asthenosphere, averages only 60 miles deep. However, within the unmoving cratons, things have long been insulated from upset; here cooled, solidified lithospheric roots may penetrate the hot interior as much as 250 miles, looking in cross section like the teeth in your gums. Toward the bottoms, diamonds form. The very oldest cratons are called archons, for the Archean eon, which ended 2.5 billion years ago. They underlie parts of Africa, Siberia, India, Brazil, Greenland, Scandinavia, Canada and the United States--all places where diamonds may be found.
      For most of history, no one knew where diamonds came from; they were found scattered in a few riverbeds. Then around 1870 miners in South Africa discovered the means by which they emerge: small, deep-seated structures called kimberlites. These are semimolten, gassy eruptions, often starting within or below the diamond stability field and tearing up through mazes of faults, fissures and weaknesses. They come in worldwide waves. No one knows why, nor has anyone seen one erupt; the last of seven known waves ended 50 million years ago. We surmise one is like a tornado, traveling upward at 20 or 30 miles an hour, smashing through innumerable layers, ripping things out on the way and creating a supercharged cereal of liquids and solids. If by chance it intersects diamonds they may come along; but considering the vast assemblage of things a kimberlite may pick up, diamonds form a minor part, if any at all. And, if the journey takes too long, gets too hot, or too much oxygen gets in, the gems will burn; after all, they are carbon, subject to the same laws as charcoal briquets. This all makes diamonds even rarer.
       Most kimberlites probably never hit the surface; they sit far below like blind, unblinking eyes. But if one gets near enough, it is progressively liberated from the pressure of overlying rock. At top, it expands and speeds, breaks through and rockets into the sky to blow out a deep, carrot-shaped crater. Magma rains back in like a souffle that has exploded and settles into itself to solidify into a kimberlite pipe. Each one is usually just a few acres on top, but often they emerge from their complex, tapered plumbing in clusters from 6 to 40. Eons later, humans dreaming of clear, tiny stones go looking for them. All the river diamonds from most of human history probably would not fill more than a wheelbarrow or so, but in the ten years after pipes were discovered, diamond production multiplied 10 times over. Since 1880 it has multiplied 40 times again, and the pace of discovery and mining has increased ever faster. Humanity has now mined over 500 tons of diamonds--a third of them in the 1990s.
      In some ways, it is like any other prospecting. Pick an area that, for whatever reason, appears prospective. Then dig gravel, soil or rock in many spots, and search it for footprints of an ore body. Ores of zinc, lead or copper may erode from a mass and leave a trail of intact rocks ("float"), an invisible chemical trail, or pure particles of the substance itself, which may be followed. Gold is, in fact, where you find it. Like diamond and most other valuable minerals, gold is heavier and more durable than your average substance. Fragments of such heavy minerals may survive long journeys in streambeds or glaciers. Swirl a panful of sand with some water, and light, usually worthless, grains like quartz float off; in the middle, gold flakes and other heavies settle.
      Once you find footprints, it is time to track them to the source. Following up rivers is standard, for they conveniently concentrate debris from identifiable watersheds. Somewhere upstream the material may suddenly peter out, which means you have just passed the first-order tributary feeding it in. Go back, pick up that tributary and follow until the same thing happens at a second-order tributary. And so on. The closer you get, the more and bigger the float, mineral grains or other signs. At the spot itself, you may see metals inside bedrock leaching out to oxidize in the air, creating a bright rusty stain, or gossan. Chunks of pure, or so-called native, copper may lie about. Visible gold may sparkle in a quartz vein. Dig. You have hit the motherlode; you and your descendants will live in splendor for many generations.
      That is the way it is supposed to work, anyway; it rarely does. Mountain ranges rise and fall, and rivers change their courses. Oceans, lakes, volcanoes and ice sheets may smear the trail or bury it altogether. You have to be smart and well informed to make the right adjustments; and in the end, also lucky. Keep an eye out for followers, bandits, backstabbers and claim-jumpers; the scientific complications of prospecting are rarely shown in old prospector movies like "Treasure of the Sierra Madre," but the treachery and madness are real.
      Diamond prospecting is the worst. Not only are diamonds rarer than gold, and kimberlite more obscured than gold ore; for the reasons above, most kimberlite contains no diamonds; and when it does, they are vanishingly rare. Gold ore grades are measured in ounces per ton, up to a pound per ton. A diamond carat, based on the weight of a tiny dried locust-tree seed, equals one-fifth of a gram, and rich deposits are measured in carats per 100 tons--parts per million. Even Russia's fabulously rich Mir Pipe has only about 60 carats per 100 tons--three quarters heavily flawed industrial stones. (Gem-quality ones are so much more valuable, they typically earn 90 percent of a mine's income.) Given this, only about 30 of the world's 6,000-some known kimberlites have ever become major mines. Even when companies think they have a mine, they may test-dig for months or years to know for sure.
      Clearly, you cannot find diamond deposits by looking for diamonds; they are too rare. Instead you must look for surrogates, secret signs. The most useful are other rare heavy minerals inhabiting kimberlite in quantities 100,000 times greater--variously called diamond indicators, pathfinders, satellites, sputniki, captives or slaves. Bleeding from kimberlite in sand-to-BB-size grains, the best are certain rare blood-red pyrope garnets, pea-green chrome diopsides and shiny black ilmenites. They may travel dozens or hundreds of miles before settling in sandbars, eskers or beaches. Four or five grains culled from among billions may start the trail.
       The specialized job of finding, distilling and tracking such heavy-mineral grains was Chuck Fipke's business. He and Stewart Blusson had come a long way to find their pipe, but things were still uncertain. When I met them in the diamond-rush summer of 1994, the question was whether there were enough diamonds to make mining in this exquisitely isolated and hostile region a feasible idea. The other question was whether it was a good idea.

     
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