| The Quest of the Ruby Hunter |
| Sunday, 13 January 2008 | |
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Meghan Ritchie searches for treasure on the world’s largest island. This morning I was woken at six by the thudding growl of a helicopter passing twenty meters over my tent – so much more effective than any wimpy alarm clock. After three summer seasons of field work in remote areas of Greenland, some of them a mere stone's throw from the ice cap, nothing is likely to get my attention more quickly than the distinctive whop of a rotor blade. Just over two years ago I was midway through my undergraduate degree in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge, when I decided that graduating with little but a selection of cashier and babysitting references on my CV might not be the best of plans. Within a few weeks, I had secured myself a position with a small Canadian company called True North Gems, Inc. And that’s how, a couple of months later, I found myself sitting in a hotel room in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, with a backpack full of Goretex and no idea what I was doing. Three days later I was dropped off alone on a barren shore with a radio and instructions to "walk between the white rock and the black rock, and look for rubies." As a result of its complex tectonic history, Greenland, like Canada and Australia, is currently a hotbed of geological and mining activity. Small companies are flocking to remote regions to search for metals and minerals, which was non-economic 20 years ago. For two summer seasons I worked for True North Gems on their ruby venture in the Fiskenasset region of southwest Greenland. When I began work on the project, little was known about the ruby deposits there and the company itself was just starting to explore the area. A few years ago, the majority of the world's most prized rubies came out of the Mogok district in Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), an area under martial law and rife with corruption and chaos. In 2003, the US imposed a trade embargo on Burmese rubies, which put intense strain on the industry to find an alternative source of gemstones. The discovery of rubies in Greenland has the potential to impact the coloured gemstone industry in much the same way that ‘bloodless’ Canadian diamonds have transformed the diamond industry. Ruby is the red variety of the mineral corundum; the blue variety is better known as sapphire. Corundum is pure aluminium oxide and its colour is the result of trace amounts of 'contamination' by chromium, iron, titanium and vanadium. Few people know that, carat for carat, ruby is far more valuable than diamond: in fact, the only gem worth more than ruby is the extremely rare emerald. A fine quality ruby can fetch up to $25,000 per carat (0.2 grams), so when I found myself standing on an area of rock much larger than my college room with a surface thickly studded with rubies, each over one centimetre across, I was a little overwhelmed. My primary tasks for True North Gems were to prospect for ruby deposits, and to produce detailed geological maps of the most significant occurrences, in order to identify potential drilling targets for future years. The deposits individually can seem deceptively small on the surface: some exceptional ones, such as the Aappaluttoq occurrence, are only two meters wide and 20 meters long. Finding these in the rocky expanse of the Greenland coast can seem like searching for a needle in a haystack, but there was method to apply to the madness. Using geological maps produced by the Greenland Geological Survey in the 1970s to identify and constrain our prospecting targets, we used boats, helicopters and sometimes even our own legs to scour the region for ruby localities. Being an exploration geologist in Greenland is much like being in the North American gold rush of the late 1800s: isolated camps of people eating tinned and wild food and spending long, wet, cold, mosquito-plagued days doggedly pursuing the one lucky strike that could change everything. Young geologists are in high demand, and those willing to camp, fly and hike in the Arctic are finding themselves the subjects of bidding wars between employers desperately seeking to staff their projects. And I can tell you that there is nothing quite like finding a half-million dollar gemstone laying in the mud. Meghan Ritchie recently graduated from the Department of Earth Sciences |
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