Diamond

Where in the World?

Nature's Canadian diamonds came from the Lac de Gras (Fat Lake) area in the Northwest Territories.

Located in the midst of a vast, beautiful landscape and cold climate, the Ekati Diamond Mine is about 300 kilometres by air northeast of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, about 200 km south of the Arctic Circle.

From October to April the temperature here regularly lingers around -30°C. The ground is permanently frozen to a depth of 350 metres. Only a shallow layer of soil thaws and re-freezes each year. During the winter, ice thickens to two metres on deeper lakes.

The mine's enormous buildings rise in isolation above the relatively flat, treeless Barrenlands. This sub-Arctic tundra is punctuated by innumerable small lakes and streams, and is sprinkled with boulder fields that were dropped more than 10,000 years ago by melting glaciers. The final stage in the manufactured land-route to the mine is a 440 km-long ice road that lasts for perhaps 10 weeks per year. Eskers that traverse the tundra provide natural highways for intermittent two- and four-footed travellers.

Tundra landscape near Ekati.

Large firs covered the region 52 million years ago when kimberlite forced its way toward the surface through pipes that begin hundreds of metres down. The diamonds carried with the originally molten material likely formed more than 2.5 billion years ago under the Earth's mantle, about 200 km or more below the surface.