Diavik and Ekati Put Canada on the Diamond Map in the 1990s

The story begins with geochemist Chuck Fipke and his partner Stewart Blusson, who spent much of the 1980s tracking glacial indicator minerals — pyrope garnets and chrome diopsides — across the Canadian Shield. Glaciers had dragged these kimberlite signatures hundreds of kilometres south of their source, and by working backward against the ice-flow direction, Fipke and Blusson triangulated a target near Lac de Gras, roughly 300 kilometres northeast of Yellowknife. In 1991 their drilling confirmed diamondiferous kimberlite at what would become the Ekati property. The announcement triggered the largest staking rush in Canadian history, with prospectors registering claims across hundreds of thousands of hectares of subarctic tundra.

Rio Tinto entered the picture through the adjacent Diavik claims, where a joint venture between Rio Tinto (60 percent) and Harry Winston Diamond Corporation (40 percent) controlled four kimberlite pipes beneath Lac de Gras itself. Ekati — a joint venture led by BHP and later BHP Billiton — opened first, in October 1998, making it Canada's first diamond mine. Diavik began production in January 2003. Together the two operations placed Canada among the world's top diamond-producing nations within a single decade, a transformation without precedent in the modern gem trade.

The logistics of both mines depend on one of the more unusual supply chains in extractive industry. No all-season road connects either site to the highway network. For roughly ten weeks each winter, ice roads are constructed across frozen lakes and tundra, allowing heavy trucks to haul fuel, equipment and supplies that would be prohibitively expensive to airlift. At Diavik, all four kimberlite pipes sit beneath the lake itself; the mine operates inside a series of dikes that hold back the water while ore is excavated — a feat of arctic engineering that required constructing a 4-kilometre containment embankment before any diamond-bearing rock could be reached.

The Diavik mine's environmental assessment documentation held before production began reflects how completely the regulatory framework had changed since the open-pit era at Kimberley: water management plans, wildlife monitoring corridors, and post-closure reclamation bonds were all conditions of approval. Both mines have operated under the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme since its 2003 implementation, certifying their rough output as conflict-free. Diavik, whose operating life has been extended beyond original expectations, has been approaching the exhaustion of its economically viable kimberlite. Ekati, under Arctic Canadian Diamond Company ownership since 2021, continued operating into the mid-2020s.