The Frozen Land of Rubies: Arctic Gem Boom Reaches Greenland

The doorstop for the door that connects True North Gems’ laboratory with its safe room is a football-sized rock that resembles a jagged slab of Roquefort. When I ask company director Nick Houghton what it was he leans over and traces the veins of rich blue that streaked the creamy marble with his finger. “Well, that’s sapphire,” he replies, a bit surprised despite himself. “I never noticed that before,” he mutters as he nudged it with his foot. He swiftly strides on while I stand there agape. I’ve got a soft spot for sapphires; they’re my birthstone.

One could be excused for taking gems for granted here at the company’s office in downtown Vancouver. Over the past six years True North Gems has dug emeralds out of the Yukon and sapphires from Baffin Island all in a bid to augment the successful Canadian diamond industry with colored gemstones.

Despite these riches, True North Gems is focusing on its ruby-bearing property at the southern tip of Greenland. They’ve turned up 29 ruby outcrops on their 110 square kilometer claim in the Fiskenaesset district, located in the bottom left hand corner of Greenland. In summer 2006, bulk sampling of the most fruitful outcrop, affectionately called “Big Red,” yielded about 9,600 carats of ruby per ton of rock. The summer before, a company geologist tugged a 440-carat ruby out of its ground.

All That Glitters Up North

The frozen north is less barren than it is booming these days.  Since Canada’s first economic diamond deposit was found in 1991, Canada has rapidly risen to become the world’s third largest diamond producer. According to Indian and Northern Affairs Canada an area almost equal to that of the entire Yukon Territory has been staked out by prospecting permits in Nunavut, Canada’s largest and newest territory, over the past three years. The number of mineral exploration licenses granted by the Greenland Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum has more than doubled from 29 granted in 2006 to 63 in 2007.

Still, True North Gems is the only player with their sights set on Greenland’s rubies and as such, they are clocking firsts fast. This summer the company finished installing its upgraded gravity-processing plant in the village of Fiskenaesset. It’s a loud clanking outfit that crunches rocks and spits out a concentrate of ruby and pink sapphire. In June the Greenland Bureau of Mines and Petroleum approved the company’s application to explore another 713 square kilometer swath next to their ruby property (the actual license is still pending).

The company’s ultimate goal is to build a ruby mine, which will join a select few others that extract rubies from the very stone in which they crystallized some two billion years ago – as opposed to collecting the already loose rubies from glacial till. “What we’re seeing is material that we’ve liberated, not that Mother Nature’s liberated,” Houghton explains. He brings out a slab of the Greenland rock. Its shiny mica matrix is peppered with juicy rubies.

How best to extract the rubies is proving have a steep learning curve, but the perks of the locale make it worth the effort. First, the rubies are blood-free, which increases the appeal to ethical jewel lovers. Second, there is no surface vegetation or extraneous layers of stone to get in the way of mining. “It’s bare rock; as far as a geologist is concerned, it’s a dream,” Houghton says. “That,” he says, slapping the slab on his lap, “you’ll walk across!” Take a stroll on their property and odds are, you’ve trampled on a handful of precious gems.

The Recipe for Rubies

Ruby is a variety of the mineral corundum, made up of aluminum oxide that turns red thanks to traces of chromium (any other color of corundum – from pink to yellow to blue - is classified as sapphire). The trick is that corundum forms only in the absence of silicon, one of the most common elements in the earth’s crust. If there’s silica around, the earth makes garnet instead. Lining up the right temperature, pressure and ingredient list is a rare event, something that no doubt helps to drive the price of rubies up. In 2006 a 8.62 carat ruby sold at Christie’s St. Moritz for US $3.6 million, or $425,000 per carat.

Rubies can crystallize in hot magma as it cools or they can continue to grow over much more time in a deep hot spring environment in a process known as hydrothermal paragenesis. Over enough time, geological processes pushed the rubies up to where they’re exposed today on Greenland’s surface.

Applying the science of ruby geology has been a key to True North’s success says Richard Herd, Curator of the Geological Survey of Canada’s National Collections “This information has been known for some time, but no one’s really gone at it quite as carefully and quite as logically as they have”. Southeast Asia furnishes most of the world’s colored gem stones, but there are signs that its production is on a slight decline. In theory, says Herd, the geology of the Arctic is the same as those high-producing areas of Asia. “So the possibility that there is material there that will yield similar material to Southeast Asia is behind a lot of what is going on.”

So far their hunch appears to be a good one. In the summer of 2006, 88 kg of unpolished rubies were extracted from 30 tons of Aappaluttoq rock by diamond-toothed chainsaws, helicopters, crushers, gravity concentration, tumblers, and sieves. Next, eight pairs of eyes go over every stone separating the pink sapphires from the red rubies, the gems from the near-gems, the “specials” (AKA really big stones) from the large (4 mm) from the medium (2-4 mm) from the small (less than 2 mm), until all that’s left is a fine ruby sand. “It breaks my heart because we’ll just dump it,” says True North Gem’s Rejane Amaral, who leads the gem sorting. “Or maybe I could pave my sidewalk with it,” she muses, as her hand sifts through the company garbage.