| In August 2006 Sunrise announced
that it had signed a farm-in and joint venture agreement with
Canada’s Nordic Diamonds Ltd (“Nordic”) under
which Sunrise could earn up to a 75% joint venture interest in
claims covering 16 of the 20 known kimberlite pipes in the
Kaavi-Kuopio area of south-central Finland, most of which are
diamondiferous. Subsequently, in January 2009, Sunrise moved to acquire 100% of the Nordic joint venture claims and Nordic retains a royalty interes.
Sunrise already held claim applications over two of the
other four pipes in this cluster and had previously identified
a number of the pipes covered by the Nordic agreement as
targets for further sampling. The 16 pipes range in size
up to 2.2 hectares and were discovered by Ashton Mining and
its joint venture partners in the period prior to that company’s
takeover by Rio Tinto in 2000, when the emphasis of diamond
exploration switched to Canada.
Work by Nordic on the joint venture claims focused
on data compilation and also on drilling two of the previously
discovered pipes (Pipes 12 and 21), with the intent of re-evaluating
diamond content and kimberlite geology. Nordic drill core
samples from Pipe 21 (reported area approximately 1.3 hectares)
returned high micro-diamond counts of up to 1.84 micro-diamonds/kg
of kimberlite supporting the results of a 16.6 tonne mini-bulk
sample previously taken by Ashton Mining in 1995, which returned
a reported grade of 26.7 carats per hundred tonnes including
a stone of 1.13 carats. Approximately 79% of the micro-diamonds
recovered by Nordic were reported to be white and 91% transparent.
The Kaavi-Kuopio claims also include three kimberlite pipes lying within five kilometres of the Lahtojoki kimberlite (Pipe 7), where bulk sampling is planned by Mantle Diamonds. They also cover a number of kimberlite targets such as the high priority “Target 295” kimberlite indicator mineral anomaly where numerous G10 garnets, kimberlitic ilmenites and kimberlitic rock fragments were found. |
