Altius Minerals Corporation has confirmed the discovery of micro and macro-diamonds on its wholly-owned 60,816 hectare Lynx Diamonds Project, located near the community of Oxford House in the province of Manitoba in Canada. The Company said that it plans to undertake further investigative work to assess the potential of this new discovery and that it had filed for 60,268 ha of new mineral exploration licenses adjacent to the current project which cover potential extensions of the prospective rock units.

The Lynx project had been optioned from a consortium of prospectors and geologists who worked in conjunction with the Manitoba Geological Survey in 2016 to study the potential of the Knee Lake area to host diamonds. The area had been recognized historically for its abundance of kimberlite indicator minerals (KIMS) in till but for which no known source of KIMS or diamonds had been identified.

During June-July 2017, Altius collected 23 additional outcrop channel and grab samples (sixteen kilograms each) from various parts of the Project. All 11 samples collected from the Eastern Bay zone were diamondiferous - yielding between 34 and 303 micro-diamonds per sample for a total of 1,149 micro-diamonds in the +0.106 mm to +0.850 mm size fraction. While eight of the diamonds are considered macros with a dimension of at least 0.5 mm, with the largest stone having a long axis of 1.42 mm, a summary of all stones larger than 0.3 mm indicated that 24% of the stones are white/colourless and 45% are off-white while 17% are octahedral.

Five micro-diamonds were identified in two samples from Western Bay out of nine collected, and a single sample collected approximately 15 km west of Eastern Bay yielded 44 microdiamonds.

The Company said it will now look to assemble a strong financial and technical group of partners to advance this project.

Pic caption: A transparent micro diamond recovered at the project