Lucapa Recovers 1,100 Diamonds from Little Spring Creek

Australian gem miner Lucapa Diamond (ASX:LOM) has unearthed 1,100 diamonds at its Little Spring Creek project in Brooking, Western Australia.

Lucapa owns 80 percent of the Brooking mine, while its project partner Leopold Diamond has the other 20 percent. The mine is located near the famed Ellendale mine, a site that up until its recent closure produced approximately half of all the yellow diamonds in the world.

“The latest micro-diamond results from Little Spring Creek are some of the best I have seen in the diamond space. To recover 1,100 micro and macro-diamonds from a 178kg sample from a single drill hole is remarkable,” Stephen Wetherall, Lucapa’s managing director, said in the press release.

Of the 1,100 diamonds recovered from drill hole LSC/DH002 by Lucapa, 18 are considered macro-diamonds, while the bulk of the remaining 1,082 are micro-diamonds.

The most recent exploration program at Brooking involved drilling, micro-diamond analysis and an airborne geophysical survey. The program was specifically designed to follow up on the Little Spring Creek lamproite discovery hole LSC/DH001, where 119 micro and macro-diamonds were recovered from an 87kg sample of drill core.

During the exploration of Brooking, 11 new lamproite targets were identified through the interpretation of the helicopter borne survey data.

“These exceptional results at Brooking underscore the proceptivity for diamond deposits in the Kimberley region of WA, which hosts the world renowned deposits of Argyle and previously Ellendale,” Wetherall added. “We look forward to the next phase of exploration at Brooking with great excitement.”

Subsequently core samples from the first 85mm at Little Spring Creek were sent to Canada for micro-diamond analysis by the Saskatchewan Research Council Geoanalytical Laboratories.

Lucapa considers the results recorded by the SRC to be “exceptional” and very promising for the Little Spring Creek site. The Canadian-based report noted, of the 1,100 diamonds recovered from the 178kg core sample, 18 were defined as macro-diamonds weighing up to 0.5mm in at least one dimension.

The rest of the recovery was comprised of 1,082 micro-diamonds.

Moving forward, the Australian diamond miner plans to look into conducting trenching and bulk sampling at Little Spring Creek, and is filing the necessary documentation needed to explore the 11 new lamproite targets.

Lucapa shares were up 13.33 percent on Tuesday (August 28), closing at AU$0.26.

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Securities Disclosure: I, Georgia Williams, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.