Digging up diamond-studded prospects in Wawa.

• Author: Stewart, Nick
• Position: SPECIAL REPORT: MINING - Dianor Resources Inc.

With recent results turning up multiple commercial-grade diamonds, including two exceeding a carat, Dianor Resources Inc. is pinning its hopes on its Wawa-area properties.

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Though designed to test the behavior and consistency of the rock, drill results from the company's 16-square-kilometre Leadbetter Diamond Project have turned up two diamonds; one 1.01-carat diamond is medium brown, intact with octahedral features, while a 1.5-carat stone is a light yellow intact macle.

This complements mid-February results, which featured 2,966 diamonds across four intervals, with the largest weighing 0.022 carats and measuring 1.97 by 1.28 by 1.09 millimetres.

"Much of the stuff we're turning up is near surface, and the results are very promising," says John Ryder, president of Dianor Resources Inc.

"We're definitely encouraged by what we're seeing out there."

As the company's most advanced project, the Leadbetter Conglomerate is a secondary deposit, meaning that its component minerals did not originate from their current location. However, Ryder says there are indicators showing they did not travel a great distance from the original source. This means the original kimberlites may also be in the area, a fact he considers to be "a bonus."

Although the exact details of future exploration plans will not be available until current data has been analyzed, Dianor is slated to spend up to $4 million on Wawa-area exploration through the rest of the year.

Of that total, Ryder estimates that up to 80 per cent of the company's time, money and energy in 2007, will be put towards taking a closer look at the Leadbetter property

"By mid-summer, we'll be looking to get back to drilling at Leadbetter, but right now, we have so much information from drilling that we have to digest it all, or we'll get indigestion. We're right now just logging the drill core, putting everything together in the geological model, and the recommendations will come from there to tell us how much more drilling and sampling will be needed."

A preliminary geological estimate has shown the Leadbetter conglomerate to contain 556-million tonnes of compacted rock, though how much of the mineral body is diamond-bearing remains to be seen.

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