Talking with Author Kevin Krajick about BARREN LANDS
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KEVIN KRAJICK’s articles have appeared in National Geographic, Newsweek, The New York Times, Science, Discover, Audubon, Natural History, Smithsonian and many other publications. He was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Public Service and is two-time winner of the American Geophysical Union’s Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism (1998 and 2004). He lives in New York City with his wife, Ruby, and daughters, Stella and Lydia. |
QUESTION: How did you get started on a book called “Barren Lands?”
KRAJICK:
In 1994 I read an article in The New York Times saying that a
couple of small-time Canadian prospectors, Chuck Fipke and Stewart Blusson, had
hit diamonds way up in northern tundra of the so-called Barren Lands. I was
dumbstruck. I had never heard of diamonds in North America, and certainly never
heard of the Barren Lands. It sounded like another planet. Being the kind of
person who dreams about faraway places--and then tries to get to them--of course
I had to go. I got myself an assignment from Discover magazine to cover
the strike, and things developed from there over a period of about six years. I
got to know the prospectors quite well, and their bizarre story. I went back to
the Barrens a half-dozen times. I can say it is the most wild and beautiful
place on Earth. Unexpectedly, I also ended up spending many months in libraries.
It was there I discovered a centuries-long secret history of diamond hunters in
the U.S. and Canada, all looking for these diamonds, this place. After that, I
had to tell the whole story.
Where are the Barren Lands and why has this territory, seemingly on the very edge of the earth, continued to attract so much attention in the past few years? The Barrens are on the edge of the earth. They’re at the very top and center of the North American continent in Canada’s Northwest Territories—as far as you can go without falling off into the Arctic Ocean. It’s 500,000 square miles with no roads, towns or people. It’s called the Barren Lands because it is past the northern limit where trees grow, and it is extremely harsh and dangerous. Fipke and Blusson sparked a giant staking rush, like the Klondike, with 260 companies airlifting in crews--a single diamond mine can be worth $70 billion. In 1998 Fipke/Blusson’s partners opened a huge diamond mine, the Ekati—North America’s first. Now, instantly, Canada is a world diamond power, threatening the De Beers cartel. There also turns out to be gold, uranium and other minerals there—and probably more diamonds, because exploration is still ongoing. Beyond the outdoor adventure and business aspects, this raises profound environmental questions. Up to now that remote part of the world has never faced the development taking over everything else. Now it may.
Despite their harshness, the Barren Lands have
drawn prospectors for centuries. What were those explorers looking for, at least
initially, and why did rumors persist of hidden treasures to be found there?
The original prospectors were Indians and Inuit. For
millennia they traveled through the Barrens, and they found native
copper—pure, unalloyed metal—just lying on the ground. This was a fabulous
treasure for them, because it made good spears, fishhooks, etc. They killed each
other over it. European fur traders reached the Hudson Bay coast in the 1670s,
and heard rumors of this fabulous “Coppermine” far west. A lot tried finding
it, but there were no maps or navigable rivers, and walking was incredibly
dangerous. Many died. My favorite was a British sailor, Samuel Hearne, who was
not a prospector at all--just a nice, blond-haired young fellow ordered by the
Hudson Bay Co. to go find this place. He walked 3,500 miles with the Indians
from 1769 to 1772. He starved, froze, shredded his feet and participated in a
horrific massacre. I think of him as Canada’s Meriwether Lewis—the first
outsider to really travel the interior. He never found anything, and published
an absolutely heart-stopping journal before drinking himself to death. After
that, the legend would never die. Everyone from Sir John Franklin to Ernest
Seton, co-founder of the Boy Scouts, showed up to hunt gold, copper, whatever,
to the present day. It turns out the Barrens have the world’s oldest rocks,
and indications of all kinds of minerals in there. The only thing the earlier
guys didn’t think of was diamonds.
Your book tells an incredible 450-year saga of
adventurers who hunted diamonds all over the continent.
Can you tell us something about these diamond hunters and the trail of
clues they were following? The first diamond hunter
was the very first European to sail into interior North America--the French
explorer Jacques Cartier. He sailed up the St. Lawrence River in the 1530s and
spotted sparkly things in the rocks--quartz crystals, but he thought they were
diamonds. Europe went crazy until the truth came out. That’s where you get the
French proverb “Voila! Un diamant du Canada!”-- the rough equivalent
of the American saying, “Phony as a three-dollar bill.” But then,
incredibly, a few hundred years later, people did start finding real diamonds.
Everyone’s forgotten about this now, but in the early 1800s, millions of
dollars’ worth of gold was panned in Georgia, Virginia and other Southern
states, and in the washings, some guys found small diamonds. The first
documented was by Dr. M.F. Stephenson near Brindletown, N.C., in 1843—1 carat
and apparently quite nice. By the way, he’s the man credited with saying,
“Thar’s gold in them thar hills!” After that, a lot of the nicest ones
were found by accident, usually by kids playing. Their eyes are close to the
ground, you know, and they pick up things just out of curiosity. There are now
about 25 states and Canadian provinces now where loose diamonds have turned up.
Hundreds of companies have followed up on random finds, but no one could find
the sources—the ore, which would be minable. Americans, and later Canadians,
became mad for diamonds. There have been failed diamond rushes from rural
Kentucky to Syracuse, New York, and endless scams involving nonexistent
diamonds. The boldest was the Great Diamond Hoax of 1872, which took in Charles
Tiffany, Gen. George McClellan and Horace Greeley, and nearly wrecked the U.S.
stock market.
You
were there in 1998 when Fipke and Blusson’s mine opened.
Can you describe the natural environment?
De Beers—of “Diamonds are forever” fame—is a cartel, a monopoly that controls the supply of diamonds worldwide. What has their relationship been to the U.S. since the time of FDR and WWII? De Beers started in the 1880s after diamonds were discovered in South Africa, and they quickly became the company Americans love to hate. For a long time they had 95 percent of the market, and Americans were always the largest consumers, so De Beers has always had them by the throat. Furthermore, the U.S. government has been virtually at war with De Beers since World War II, when we needed industrial diamonds. Not only did De Beers hold back; intelligence suspected they supplied stones to the Nazis. Since then, we have continuously sued them under the Sherman Antitrust Act. Of course De Beers conducts the big U.S. ad campaigns, but that is through intermediaries—they are virtually prohibited from doing direct business in the U.S. But the truly fascinating thing is—and this is revealed for the first time in my book—that in spite of all this, De Beers has prospected U.S. territory on and off for decades, using dummy corporations and secret agents. They’re in Canada, too, a little more openly. And that is who Fipke and Blusson were up against.
Little was known about diamond prospecting until
very recently. Potential sites and
the process of finding them have always been well-kept secrets.
Can you tell us briefly how diamonds are formed and how they are found?
What are “indicator minerals?” For most of history, no
one had any idea where they came from—they just turned up in riverbeds. People
thought maybe they grew in the sand, like seeds. Then in the 1870s they were
found in South Africa in fantastic quantities. So many prospectors rushed and
dug so many holes, they stumbled on the actual ore. That is kimberlite—a sort
of volcanic material from deep in the earth. Kimberlite deposits, or
“pipes,” are usually small, just a few acres at the surface. The diamonds
are made under fantastic heat and pressure, probably 75 to 125 miles down—not
as the proverbial lumps of coal, but more likely from primordial carbon. But
here’s a problem: even the richest pipes’ diamond content is just parts per
million--and that is where indicator minerals come in. The indicators are
unusual deep-earth minerals that also come up along with diamonds, but in much
greater quantity. So instead of looking for diamonds you look for indicators, in
streambeds, beaches or other formations, then try to trace them backward to a
kimberlite. Two main ones are dark red pyrope garnets and green chrome diopsides.
They’re often only sand grains, so it takes the industry of an insect colony
to find them, never mind trace the source. Then, most kimberlites don’t have
any diamonds at all--one half of one percent are minable. So, you can spend your
whole life looking for diamonds and never find even one.
Historically, where have the world’s richest diamond mines been? Until South Africa, all diamonds came from India, then, starting in the 1720s, Brazil. Everything mined from the early sources would not much more than fill a few wheelbarrows. But since the discovery of kimberlite, we have probably mined over 500 tons of diamonds. Besides South Africa, some other diamond-rich places are Botswana, Zambia, Tanzania and western Australia—all located in the most ancient rocks, like the ancient rocks of northern Canada. In the 1950s the Russians discovered them in Siberia, in similarly ancient rocks.
Where have diamonds been found in the U.S. and Canada? What is the Crater of Diamonds? Loose diamonds of more than 2 carats have been found in Alabama, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois and Indiana. A lot of other states, and most Canadian provinces, have smaller diamonds or unverified finds. Crater of Diamonds: for decades this was the only place where diamonds had been found in the ore, instead of a streambed. It’s near the little town of Murfreesboro, Arkansas. A backwoods farmer, John Huddleston, found it in 1906 and sold out—all $10 bills, he insisted-- but the investors could never make a go of it. Maybe the grade was too low. But they were also plagued by mysterious episodes of arson, theft, and in one case, attempted murder in an outhouse. Even now some people mutter that De Beers was behind some kind of conspiracy to make sure it failed. Then in the 1970s, Arkansas turned it into Crater of Diamonds State Park; you pay $5 or so to dig and keep anything you find. It’s a hit--80,000 people a year show up. Most of the stones are not worth much, but occasionally diggers do find spectacular ones, worth tens of thousands. Hillary Clinton wore a 4.25 carat diamond ring from Crater of Diamonds at her husband Bill’s first presidential inaugural ball.
Can you explain “the formula” that one scientist hit upon before De Beers could, which enabled Fipke and Blusson to beat De Beers in the race to the Arctic mines? De Beers has endless, uperior, scientific resources, and vast organization—but the dirty little secret is that the little guys almost always beat them to the diamonds. Only afterward does De Beers move in to take over somehow. As for the formula: indicator minerals often all look the same, whether they are from a diamond-rich kimberlite or a barren one, and so prospectors often spend decades on false leads. However: it turns out that indicators from diamondiferous kimberlites do have a subtly different chemical composition. Garnets, for instance, have an anomalously high ratio of chromium, and low calcium. It was Dr. John Gurney, a Cape Town geochemistry professor, who figured this out in the 1980s. It remained a dead secret--until Chuck Fipke by various means got his hands on this information and began using it. De Beers later figured it out too, but too late—by then Fipke and his partners had found and tracked these chemically significant minerals clear across the Barrens.
What is happening today at the Arctic mines, and what are the
implications? Fipke et al. staked out
960,000 acres--in Canada you can do that because the government controls mineral
rights. They then sold a 51 percent interest to BHP, an Australian mining
conglomerate, and BHP has now found at least six viable pipes, worth at least
$17 billion, plus hundreds of others with lower grades. Probably many of them
could be mined some day. The Ekati mine, opened in ’98, is basically a series
of gigantic open pits with an awesome complex of buildings in the middle of
nowhere, like a settlement on Mars. They produce a coffee-can full of diamonds
per day, at fantastic expense. The place is served by air, because there are no
roads—but these are high-quality gems, and they will have huge profits by
2002. The competitors, including De Beers, staked out about 100,000 square miles
around them, and they also have found hundreds of pipes. One outfit, Diavik
Diamonds, is due to open its own mine in 2003.
Analysts estimate the Barrens will supply 15 percent of the world diamond
market within the next few years. They’ll be exploring up there for the next
100 years--this is just the start. The greatest impact, though, may be not on
the diamond market, but on the Barren Lands themselves. With diamond money,
there is pressure to build a road, run power lines and continue the spider web
of development in all directions. Once you start on that path, things will never
be the same.
The search for diamonds continues. Where will it go next? The search for diamonds is a never-ending quest. Even though they are zillionaires, Chuck Fipke and Stew Blusson are still out there combing the world for more diamonds. De Beers alone has 2,000 exploration personnel, on every continent except Antarctica. Elsewhere in North America there is highly active exploration by various other companies in northern Saskatchewan, Alberta, Quebec, and Ontario, where quite a few low-grade pipes have been found. Also along the Wyoming/Colorado state line, where low-grade pipes have turned up. Abroad, Greenland and Finland have seen a lot of activity lately. Meteorite craters around the world are also coming under the scope. That is because meteorites may carry diamonds from space, or may form them amid the heat and pressure of impact with Earth. Most of those diamonds are tiny and charred, but lately the ability to spot old craters via satellite imagery has improved dramatically, and that greatly heightens the odds of finding a productive crater. So, prospectors are now actually looking for diamonds from outer space.