Diamond hunter Chris Jennings played a key role in finding Diavik deposit in Northwest Territories

On Nov. 12, 1991, the Australian minerals giant BHP issued a spare, eight-sentence press release that dropped like a bomb on Canadian mining. At a tiny lake 300 kilometres northeast of Yellowknife, the company and its Canadian partners had discovered microdiamonds.Canada would become a major diamond producer, but at the time the news stunned the mining community. Diamonds in the Arctic? A group of men and women who had spent their lives ransacking Canada for minerals gathered for a late-night meeting in Toronto as they tried to understand the news.