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How to Close a Diamond Mine in the Northwest Territories

After shutting commercial operations, Diavik wants to disappear without a trace

ENVIRONMENT / MAY 2026

How to Close a Diamond Mine in the Northwest Territories

After shutting commercial operations, Diavik wants to disappear without a trace

WORDS AND PHOTOS BY PAT KANE

Published 6:30, FEBRUARY 25, 2026

THE DIAVIK DIAMOND MINE sits on an island in the middle of a lake, which itself is surrounded by hundreds of other lakes and the barren lands of the Northwest Territories. From above, three human-made craters look like God Herself started drilling giant, threaded holes into the landscape.

But a more detailed scan over the tundra reveals a bustling collection of trucks weaving along gravel roads toward, and away from, buildings of all shapes and sizes. From the air, it looks like a town was plopped down among the rocky outcrops of the unforgiving Arctic terrain. It’s fascinating to see such a place and hard to imagine that this will all vanish—as if nobody ever set foot here—in just a few years’ time. That’s the plan anyway.

All commercial diamond mining was scheduled to stop in March, marking the beginning of the end of the mine’s life. Joe Blandford, one of the superintendents, remembers when there were only a couple of trailers on site and a small construction crew plotting out the mine’s future.

“Not everybody says they enjoy coming to work, but you make friends over the years, and I’ll miss the people,” he says. “It’s going to be hard to keep in touch with all of them.”

THE MINE OWES its beginnings to an eccentric fortune seeker named Chuck Fipke. In 1991, Fipke was a young (and, by all accounts, hare-brained) geologist with his own company, called Dia Met Minerals Ltd. He and his partner, Stewart Blusson, found eighty-one small diamonds at Lac de Gras, roughly 300 kilometres........

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