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Gold rushes have given birth to towns all over Alaska. Fairbanks, for example, exists because Felix Pedro found a few nuggets of gold north of here about 100 years ago. In Canada, a stampede for diamonds is now making one of its loneliest regions a bit noisier, and a whole lot wealthier.

In the Northwest Territories, companies are extracting the equivalent of a coffee can full of diamonds each day. The gems within that can are collectively worth $1.4 million. The great diamond rush of the north began in the early 1990s.

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Kevin Krajick tells the story of this modern stampede in his new book, "Barren Lands: An Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic." Krajick is a writer based in New York City who spent eight years writing his book, including many trips to one of the most remote regions of North America, the treeless northern region of Northwest Territories known as the Barren Lands. There, a prospector named Chuck Fipke in 1990 found evidence of diamonds, sparking one of the greatest mining rushes in history.

Diamonds are a transparent form of nearly pure carbon that is much rarer than gold. People have mined about 1 million pounds of diamonds since mining began, compared to more than 260 million pounds of gold.

Once a prospector finds a good deposit, diamond miners must move an incredible amount of ore. One of the richest diamond mines in the world, Russia's Mir Pipe, yields about 12 grams of diamonds per 100 tons of earth. Gold miners measure deposits in pounds or even ounces per ton.

Diamond prospectors had been looking for a great North American diamond mine for 450 years, but Canada had no diamond mines before the late 1990s. The Ekati mine, about 200 miles northeast of Yellowknife and the site of Fipke's discovery, produced nearly $600 million worth of diamonds in 2000. Some experts think Canada will become the world's top producer of diamonds within 20 years, overtaking South Africa.

The rocks underlying Alaska are much younger than the rocks beneath the diamond-rich part of the Northwest Territories, so geologists say the possibility for a large diamond find in Alaska is not nearly as high. But you never know. In 1982, a miner near Central, Alaska found a diamond as he was placer mining on Crooked Creek. Two other people found diamonds near the same creek. Gold companies that already had the creek staked have drilled for diamonds in the area, but with no reported success. The diamond cartel De Beers has also been poking around in Alaska, though the company keeps its results secret.

In the rocky Barren Lands of Canada's Northwest Territories, where you can go a thousand miles without seeing a road or tree, Charles Fipke was standing a few months back in ankle-deep mud at the face of a mine 700 feet below the bed of a small lake. With a hammer, he cracked out a fist-size chunk of gray rock, shoved it into the beam of his helmet lamp, and eyeballed it with an intense scowl. Then he dropped it into his battered brown backpack and turned to go. Once again he was digging ore from the belly of his own personal beast--the innards of an ancient diamond-bearing volcano.

Rich diamond veins, called pipes, are so difficult to find that only 15 major ones are known, and they're all in Africa, Siberia, and Australia. Until now, not one major pipe has been discovered in the Western Hemisphere. Yet Fipke and friends have unearthed what may be a whole cluster. To find them, Fipke--armed chiefly with a B.S. in geology, an uproarious laugh, and an absentmindedness manifested in perpetually untied shoelaces--had to track clues through the wilderness for a decade and outsmart the pursuing South African De Beers cartel. Now he is sitting on deposits probably worth billions, and Canada may soon be a world-class diamond producer. In a boulder-strewn sub-Arctic landscape where wolves and caribou roam, 260 companies have staked out 53 million acres; drill rigs brought in by helicopter have settled on the tundra like mosquitoes to suck out core samples; ore trucks rumble from blasted-out tunnels; and whole villages of geologists have sprung up. What they are finding opens a brand- new window on the supersecret world of diamond exploration. It could change the diamond market--and the wild, isolated Barren Lands--forever.

In 1978, Hugo Dummett, a South African geologist working for Superior Oil, hired Fipke to look for base metals, gold, and diamonds-- Fipke's first stab at this commodity. They headed for the Colorado Rockies, where previous explorers had found a few, albeit small, diamonds. Colleagues remember Fipke's eccentric enthusiasm: "On a steep slope at 10,000 feet, Chuck would jump out of a helicopter like he was getting off a bus," says Tom McCandless, a fellow geologist. "He'd collect rocks in a golf shirt and a vest from Kmart while everyone else had a down parka." Dummett--who himself cuts a figure somewhere between a U.S. senator and a bear--went roped with Fipke to keep from falling into snow crevasses. They worked their way up into the Canadian Rockies, finding occasional clues but few diamonds.

Since knowledge of how diamonds form and where they appear was-- and still is--theoretical in many respects, companies like Superior guard their scientific information closely. The stakes are high: a diamond mine can be worth $6 billion or more. For decades industry scientists have tried to target sites by analyzing every physical, geologic, and chemical aspect of known mines, and by re-creating diamonds and other minerals in the lab. Company scientists are organized into guerrilla-like cells, so no one knows too much about what others do. Thus, at Superior, Fipke was instructed to tell no one what he was looking for, or where. Nor could Dummett, in charge of day-to-day exploration, tell Fipke about any of the company's efforts to develop new diamond-finding technologies.

In the last several years, some of what was then secret about diamond mining has emerged. It is thought that most diamonds come from at least 70 miles down, within Earth's mantle. There, under enormous pressure and at temperatures of 1700 to nearly 2300 degrees Fahrenheit, carbon atoms form crystals. (A recent find of Brazilian diamonds from more than 400 miles down suggests there may be no depth limit.) In many areas, though, the geothermal gradient is too high: that is, as depth increases, temperature goes up too steeply because of friction from moving rock. The right combination of great pressure and low temperature--the "diamond stability field"--seems to occur chiefly under archons, the most ancient nuclei of continents, to which more recent landmasses are appended. Apparently archons, stable for at least 2.5 billion years, develop solid, cool "roots" with the proper gradient. Studies in the 1960s duly located archons under the African and Siberian diamond fields. But by 1990 seismologists had mapped an archon containing the world's oldest dated rock--3.962 billion years--in a place where diamonds were unknown: the Barren Lands of Canada.

Dummett had hired Fipke to look for kimberlite pipes, which are the volcanic routes through which diamonds rise. Kimberlite begins as magma in Earth's mantle. For reasons that are unclear, the kimberlite erupts from farther down than ordinary volcanic rock, which comes from roughly 6 to 50 miles down. No one knows what triggers kimberlite pipes, nor why they come in clusters of 6 to 40. One theory says disturbances in Earth's magnetic field periodically send them through weaknesses in the bedrock. The oldest known kimberlites are 1.6 billion years old; the youngest, in Tanzania, date back 40 million years.

Kimberlites are like elevators picking up passengers: as the magma smashes through layers of rock, it rips out debris, creating a supercharged breakfast cereal of liquid and solid material; if it intersects diamonds, some may come along. If they are to survive, though, they must shoot to the surface quickly; estimates vary from hours to weeks. Otherwise they revert to graphite or they burn--probably the fate of many. Near the top, liberated from the pressure of surrounding rock, the pipe blows out a carrot-shaped crater that can cover many acres, then settles back in to cool off. Layers of unrelated rock may subsequently build up over the pipe. In the Canadian Northwest, where Fipke roams, most pipes are under small lakes: kimberlite is softer than bedrock, and when glaciers come through, they scoop out depressions over the pipes, which later fill with water. At some point a few hundred million years later, humans dreaming of clear, tiny stones may come looking for such a spot.

Diamonds are so rare that they are almost impossible to detect directly: very rich pipes contain maybe three carats per ton of kimberlite. So explorers look for specks of "indicator minerals" peculiar to the mantle but carried up in far greater quantities than diamonds and eroded out of pipes into the surrounding land. The standard ones are reddish pyrope garnets, dull-hued chromites, iron-heavy ilmenites, and bright green chrome diopsides. The problem is that one can spend years panning indicators out of streambeds, beaches, even anthills, and trace them back to their source, but 90 percent of the 4,000 kimberlite pipes found this way are barren, and most of the rest are too sparse to mine.

"You can spend your life looking and never see a diamond," says Chris Jennings, a geologist who worked for one of Superior's partners when Fipke was hired. And Jennings knew: he had combed Botswana's Kalahari Desert for kimberlite pipes and found dozens, but none good enough for a mine. He badly wanted a secret weapon, a new way to locate a diamond-rich pipe.

He believed he'd found it in 1978 when he hired a Cape Town geochemistry professor named John Gurney as a consultant. Gurney had analyzed samples of indicator minerals from all over the world. Many came from mines held by De Beers, which directly or indirectly controls 80 percent of the world diamond market. ff782bc1db