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Chris Jennings, in April, 2016, simply south of Lac de Gras, N.W.T., nonetheless exploring on the age of 82.Courtesy of household
On Nov. 12, 1991, the Australian minerals big BHP issued a spare, eight-sentence press launch that dropped like a bomb on Canadian mining. At a tiny lake 300 kilometres northeast of Yellowknife, the corporate and its Canadian companions had found microdiamonds.
Canada would turn into a significant diamond producer, however on the time the information surprised the mining group. Diamonds within the Arctic? A bunch of women and men who had spent their lives ransacking Canada for minerals gathered for a late-night assembly in Toronto as they tried to know the information.
The mining veterans didn’t have the faintest concept what to make of the invention. Certainly one of them recommended calling Chris Jennings.
Christopher Mark Hubert Jennings, who died in Niagara-on-the-Lake on Dec. 11 on the age of 90, after a protracted battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, was a tall, athletic South African geologist. He had moved to Canada 10 years earlier than the invention, and was an early believer that the geology of Canada was excellent for diamonds. When the group in Toronto lastly tracked him down, he was in London pitching buyers on a diamond-exploration plan of his personal. He took the primary aircraft again and went straight into a gathering with them.
The late geologist and mine promoter Robert Gannicott, who was there, described Mr. Jennings’s impassioned presentation. “Well, he had it all. He came in and we had a meeting and he poured it out. He had the whole thing down pat – why there were diamonds there, why it was going to be the greatest diamond strike since Kimberley. You know Chris – bigger than Kimberley.” He was referring to the large diamond rush in Kimberley, South Africa, greater than a century earlier that established that nation as a world chief in diamond mining.
“We could hardly wait to get up there,” Mr. Gannicott stated.
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The Diavik Diamond Mine on Lac de Gras, within the Northwest Territories.Fred Lum/ Ontario Chronicle
For Chris Jennings, it had been a protracted journey.
He was born on Feb. 15, 1934, in Durban, South Africa. His father, Hubert, was an English-born grasp at a well-known boys’ college, and later, a scholar and translator of the Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa. His mom, Irene, was the daughter of a senior police officer. As a toddler she had travelled by ox cart by means of her father’s enormous district in what was then the Transvaal. Additionally overseas within the countryside, however for darker functions, was one other member of the family – Irene’s uncle. Cecil Barnard was an notorious poacher whose exploits impressed the favored South African potboiler The Ivory Path. Chris Jennings grew up on tales of women and men who spent their lives removed from metropolis streets.
The yr after Chris was born, Hubert accepted a job as head of a faculty 65 kilometres (40 miles) up the coast from Durban, the place Chris’s sister, Bridget, was born. 5 years later the household moved to Greytown, within the Natal Midlands.
From Greytown the land ripples up into the Drakensberg vary. Chris and his father roamed the mountains, tenting within the upland meadows and fishing for trout within the streams. It was there that the boy developed a ardour for the outside. He discovered one thing else in Greytown too: his future spouse.
Jeanne (Jenny) Nel was the daughter of an area farmer who was additionally probably the most well-known sportsman in South Africa. Philip Nel’s
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Mr. Jennings within the Kalahari with the electrical rig he used to seize the geophysical signature of the Orapa diamond pipe.Courtesy of household
triumphs as captain of the nationwide rugby group, the Springboks, included a celebrated defeat of New Zealand’s All Blacks in a collection, a victory that made him a nationwide hero. Years later, when Mr. Jennings was exploring a diamond deposit in South Africa, he advised a reporter: “If you want co-operation from the locals, just tell them you’re writing about Philip Nel’s son-in-law.”
Mr. Jennings took his honours degree in geology (and later his PhD) on the College of Natal in Durban, the place he was captain of the rugby group whereas on the identical time enjoying for the Natal provincial facet.
He and Jenny married in Greytown on Dec. 29, 1956. After a brief honeymoon they packed their belongings into an Austin half-ton pickup and headed north. The Austin promptly broke down, however they received it fastened and accomplished the sweltering journey to their new house, an equally sweltering prefab within the city of Lobatse, Botswana.
Botswana then was then nonetheless the British protectorate of Bechuanaland, and Mr. Jennings a newly minted authorities geologist. Certainly one of his first duties was finding water sources within the Kalahari. He devised a contraption powered by batteries that despatched a cost down into the bottom, bouncing again when it struck a formation. Mr. Jennings discovered to tell apart the geophysical signature that exposed a water basin. Loading his equipment into the federal government geological survey’s historical five-ton Bedford truck, he and his spouse, and later their daughters, too, would go rattling off into the desert.
“Most nights you’d hear a lion roaring,” Ms. Jennings remembered. “And the Kalahari had leopards too. They’d just walk around us and carry on walking. I’d see their tracks in the morning.”
Mr. Jennings was all the time pleased with his work offering ingesting water within the desert, however the occasion that modified his life was the 1967 discovery of an enormous diamond pipe at Orapa, on the northern fringe of the Kalahari. A pipe is the carrot-shaped extinct volcano of a typical diamond deposit. The geologist who found Orapa knew about Mr. Jennings’s contraption, and invited him to carry it to Orapa to see if the large pipe had a signature that distinguished it from the encompassing desert. It did, and when Mr. Jennings left Botswana 4 years later to take up a senior job in Johannesburg with the Canadian worldwide miner Falconbridge Ltd., the signature of that diamond pipe obsessed him. It was the beginning of a trajectory that may land him, 20 years later, in a winter staking rush in Canada.
As head of African exploration, Mr. Jennings persuaded Falconbridge to let him run a diamond hunt in Botswana. He seemed for the signatures that haunted him, then assessed them utilizing the brand new science of diamond indicators. Indicators are a collection of minerals, particularly a kind of garnet, that time to the nearness of diamonds. Utilizing this information – on the time extremely secret – Mr. Jennings discovered a tantalizing prospect. It had taken eight years. However simply at what ought to have been his second of triumph, Falconbridge transferred him to Toronto and, quickly after, cancelled the diamond challenge.
It was a low level within the explorer’s life. Furthermore, he needed to watch as one other prospector, utilizing the indicator data Mr. Jennings had fostered, moved in on Canada’s diamonds. Chuck Fipke was a geologist employed by Superior Oil, Falconbridge’s greatest shareholder, to pattern North American targets. When that exploration too was shut down, Mr. Fipke went out on his personal. He was quickly monitoring garnets by means of the Northwest Territories.
In frustration, Mr. Jennings stop Falconbridge, taking jobs that allowed him to search for diamonds. In 1990, as Mr. Fipke was closing in on his discovery, a geologist employed by Mr. Jennings discovered indicator minerals in the identical space. That’s the information he was sharing with buyers in London when BHP introduced Mr. Fipke’s discovery, igniting the diamond rush.
The winter staking rush within the huge steppe known as the Barrens was one of many excessive adventures of Canada’s storied mining historical past. In solely months an airborne swarm of prospectors staked an space the scale of France. Mr. Jennings and his good friend Grenville (Gren) Thomas, a Vancouver mine developer, arrange a tent at Glowworm Lake. The temperature dropped to -30 C. They saved the meat in a frozen stack outdoors.
“If you felt like a steak,” Mr. Thomas stated, “you chipped one off with an axe.”
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Mr. Jennings, left, with household Jenny, John and Marc, within the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia in 1982.Courtesy of household
A generator roared by means of the night time to maintain the helicopter from freezing up. The staking crew huddled within the tent, a hearth hissing within the range whereas Mr. Jennings unfold out the maps and plotted the following day’s work. The targets he picked for his companions contained a pair of wealthy diamond pipes that turned the Diavik mine. Canada turned the third greatest diamond producer on the earth.
Mr. Jennings and his spouse divided their time between Lengau, their personal sport lodge in South Africa, and Wellbrook, a home in Niagara-on-the-Lake giant sufficient for the entire household to congregate: their daughters Jeannine Jennings and Louise (Zizi) Wattrus, sons Marc and John, plus their youngsters’s spouses, eight grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter.
Among the many prettiest jewels ever to return out of the Arctic had been a handful of tiny, intensely vivid orange diamonds. They got here from a pipe in Nunavut, on the northern shores of Hudson Bay. Mr. Jennings helped the individuals who discovered these diamonds, and eagerly adopted the hunt that goes on to at the present time. An explorer to the tip.
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