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. 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. Then he dropped it into his battered brown backpack and turned to go. Once again he was digging ore from the belly of his own personal beast--the innards of an ancient diamond-bearing volcano.
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. Until now, not one major pipe has been discovered in the Western Hemisphere. Yet Fipke and friends have unearthed what may be a whole cluster. To find them, Fipke--armed chiefly with a B.S. 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. Now he is sitting on deposits probably worth billions, and Canada may soon be a world-class diamond producer. 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. What they are finding opens a brand- new window on the supersecret world of diamond exploration. It could change the diamond market--and the wild, isolated Barren Lands--forever.
Fipke, now 48, once wanted to be an ornithologist. 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?"). For seven years he, his wife, Marlene, and their kids bounced through mining outfits in Brazil, New Guinea, Australia, and South Africa. 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. Fipke sorted dirt in homemade backyard machines; Marlene dried piles of gravel in the kitchen gas oven.
In 1978, Hugo Dummett, a South African geologist working for Superior Oil, hired Fipke to look for base metals, gold, and diamonds-- Fipke's first stab at this commodity. They headed for the Colorado Rockies, where previous explorers had found a few, albeit small, diamonds. Colleagues remember Fipke's eccentric enthusiasm: "On a steep slope at 10,000 feet, Chuck would jump out of a helicopter like he was getting off a bus," says Tom McCandless, a fellow geologist. "He'd collect rocks in a golf shirt and a vest from Kmart while everyone else had a down parka." Dummett--who himself cuts a figure somewhere between a U.S. senator and a bear--went roped with Fipke to keep from falling into snow crevasses. They worked their way up into the Canadian Rockies, finding occasional clues but few diamonds.
Since knowledge of how diamonds form and where they appear was-- and still is--theoretical in many respects, companies like Superior guard their scientific information closely. The stakes are high: a diamond mine can be worth $6 billion or more. For decades industry scientists have tried to target sites by analyzing every physical, geologic, and chemical aspect of known mines, and by re-creating diamonds and other minerals in the lab. Company scientists are organized into guerrilla-like cells, so no one knows too much about what others do. Thus, at Superior, Fipke was instructed to tell no one what he was looking for, or where. Nor could Dummett, in charge of day-to-day exploration, tell Fipke about any of the company's efforts to develop new diamond-finding technologies.
