True North sees red riches in Greenland

“Our dreams are in colour,” reads the web site for True North Gems, the mining company that’s developing emerald, sapphire and now ruby deposits across the Arctic.

True North Gems is best known for being the developer of the Regal Ridge emerald deposit in the Yukon and the Beluga sapphire property near Kimmirut.

But True North Gems is now setting its sights on becoming a top producer of rubies, too, thanks to promising results from its new Fiskenaesset ruby property in Greenland, located about 160 kilometres south of Nuuk.

Rubies, along with emeralds and sapphires, are known as the “big three” gemstones. And, among those three, ruby is by far the most rare and most valuable. Ruby has a hardness of nine out of 10, which makes it second in hardness only to diamond. This quality makes rubies an excellent gemstone for use in jewelry.

Initial sampling from the Aappaluttoq (“Big Red”) ruby occurrence in the Fiskenaesset has already included an exceptionally large piece of ruby, weighing a total of 89 grams or 445 carats.

True North gemologists say this piece can produce an individual ruby crystal with an approximate rough weight of 40 grams or 200 carats. A large, high-quality ruby similar to “Big Red” can sell in the range of $1,450 (U.S.) to $25,000 (U.S.) per carat. No dollar value has been assigned to the Aappaluttoq ruby yet.
Deposits of ruby are mined in only a few places in the world: Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and Tanzania.

Ruby was first discovered in Greenland in 1953 and to date, 50 tonnes of high-grade ruby ore have been produced there. The Fiskenaesset ruby property has been explored off and on, before True North Gems entered on the scene.

To date, the company has located six individual occurrences of ruby in the Fiskenaesset area, and True North Gems believes the property has excellent potential to be “a secure, long-life mine source for a lucrative gemstone polishing operation.”

This year, the company gathered mini-bulk samples for analysis. In 2006, more prospecting will also be done to see the extent of the deposits, and, the company says, to hopefully find more. At the same time, True North Gems is starting market tests for new gemstone and jewelry products.

True North also continued to explore the Beluga Sapphire site near Kimmirut this summer.

Like ruby, sapphire is also a variety of the mineral corundum, but sapphire owes its blue colour to the presence of tiny amounts of iron and titanium, whereas ruby’s red colour is the result of chromium in the crystal.

Preliminary valuations at the Beluga site are looking good, says expert evaluator Warren Boyd of R.T. Boyd Limited. In his report to True North Gems, Boyd says the Beluga sapphire property is “of strong interest” based on the quality of its naturally-coloured sapphires.

“The quality and spectral intensity of the Blue Sapphires… from the Beluga property was of world class caliber and comparable to some of the better quality sapphires produced from deposits in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, Africa, Australia and China,” Boyd said.