Lucapa Diamond Company Limited recently started work on a new exploration programme at the Brooking diamond project in Western Australia’s West Kimberley lamproite province.  The project is owned by Lucapa (80%) and its partner Leopold (20%).

Lucapa had earlier announced that the exploration programme currently underway “was designed to follow up on the spectacular micro- and macro-diamond counts” recovered from the first two holes drilled at the Little Spring Creek (LSC) diamond discovery.

Lucapa enumerating the results said they   included:

• 119 micro- and macro-diamonds from an 87 kg sample of drill core from discovery hole LSC/DH001; and

• 1,100 micro- and macro-diamonds from a 178 kg sample of drill core from follow-up hole LSC/DH002

Lucapa added that the follow-up Brooking exploration programme comprises:

• Bulk sampling of the Little Spring Creek lamproitic body to test commercial macro-diamond population, value and grade;

• Drilling new lamproite targets defined within the broader Brooking project; and

• Re-assessing the known Big Spring Creek lamproites

The Company aims to extract a ~100 tonne bulk sample of lamproite material towards which trenching and bulk sampling has commenced at Little Spring Creek. 

Lucapa also confirmed it has received Heritage clearances to commence drilling 10 of the new lamproite targets within the 118 km2 Brooking project, where drilling will commence once the other necessary clearances are obtained.

“The drilling targets include a ~7 hectare anomaly identified at Katie’s Bore, where 20 micro-diamonds and high levels of lamproite indicator minerals were recovered from previous stream sampling,” Lucapa said. “Additional geophysical drilling targets were also identified within the North East Creek and Homestead Creek prospects, where micro-diamonds and indicator minerals were also previously recovered.”

Apart from these Lucapa also plans to “selectively drill and collect surface and outcropping samples” at the known Big Spring Creek cluster of lamproites in the north-east of the Brooking project, which were discovered by CRA Exploration in the 1970s. “This drilling and surface sampling aims to recover material which will be used to re-assess the lamproite bodies for diamond potential,” the Company said.

Once the results of the Little Spring Creek bulk sampling programme and the Brooking drilling program have come in, they will determine the scope and scale of follow-up work at the project, Lucapa concluded.