VANCOUVER, British Columbia TRUE NORTH GEMS has sent samples of the blue beryl it discovered on its True Blue property in the Finlayson District in the Yukon to the UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA and the CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY for authentication and characterization. A suite of faceted stones will be forwarded to the GEMOLOGICAL INSTITUTE OF AMERICA for formal characterization.
True North says the beryl is noteworthy for its very intense saturation of blue colour. The discovery was made in a swarm of closely-spaced quartz-carbonate-tourmaline veinlets that cut a Mississippian-age fluorite-bearing syenite stock. The veins occupy a dense network of orthogonal tension gashes. They measure 0.5 to 20 cm in thickness and locally comprise up to 30% of the rock overall. The veins have sharp, parallel wall-rock contacts and display coarse-granular crystal growth of gem-quality beryl replacing tourmaline, and radiating from nucleation points. The veins identified to date lie in a zone measuring 600 m by 100 m in outcrop at the surface over an elevation range of 100 m.
Pictures of the blue beryls are available in the Photo Gallery at www.truenorthgems.com.
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