Posted on 01/15/2018 12:42:40 PM PST by DUMBGRUNT
The 910-carat diamond found at the Letseng mine in Lesotho is the fifth-largest gem-quality diamond ever found. It said the stone is a D color, Type IIa diamond, meaning it is colorless and very radiant, without any yellow tint or impurities like nitrogen that absorb light and decrease luster.
Gem Diamond’s stock jumped sharply on news of the discovery.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I knew a woman once who wouldn’t have been satisfied with that on her finger.
I know exactly what she wanted.
Just a lump of glorified coal. I’ll give $20 for it (in a generous mood).
Workers at Lesotho’s Letšeng mine have discovered an absolute whopper of a diamond, rated at 910-carats. Roughly the size of two golf balls, the precious gem has an estimated value of $40 million. ....................
Why, I use bigger diamonds than that for fill dirt.
Is that $40 million “street value”?
Kind of a hilarious thing in some ways. Why you ask? Well, having been to Lesotho I can tell you it is indeed beautiful but where people live and how they live....well, there’s a word for that! Regardless of such finds it remains one of the poorest and most corrupt and AIDS ridden nations of the world.
Pray for Lesotho, indeed all of Africa.
I don’t know. I don’t live on that street........................
Imagine if it weighed more than a bowling ball.
My daughter visited Lesotho a couple years ago. I asked her about that but she was mostly in the city area, not the villages. one of her roommates was working at a mission for the summer and my daughter went to visit.
They took time to do that 700 foot rappel down the waterfall.
Unless you have an industrial use for them, can be replaced with broken glass.
Too bad that they can already make them bigger in the lab. No matter what the De Beers diamond cartel does, one day lab grown diamonds will be indistinguishable from mined diamonds.
That will be one big step towards reducing the impact of diamond mining.
I’ve seen diamonds before, and that is NOT A DIAMOND.
You, sir, are a martyr to your own generosity. (Cough-cough).
They have NO resale value. Diamonds are not even rare there are warehouses of them. They keep supply low. They are worthless.
Gezuntite.
The New Diamond Age
Armed with inexpensive, mass-produced gems, two startups are launching an assault on the De Beers cartel.
https://www.wired.com/2003/09/diamond/
Old news, but still a fun read.
“This is very rare stone,” he says, almost to himself, in thickly accented English. “Yellow diamonds of this color are very hard to find. It is probably worth 10, maybe 15 thousand dollars.”
“I have two more exactly like it in my pocket,” I tell him.
He puts the diamond down and looks at me seriously for the first time. I place the other two stones on the table. They are all the same color and size. To find three nearly identical yellow diamonds is like flipping a coin 10,000 times and never seeing tails.
“These are cubic zirconium?” Weingarten says without much hope.
“No, they’re real,” I tell him. “But they were made by a machine in Florida for less than a hundred dollars.”
Might have to wait a bit, for that size...
Can’t grow any bigger than the CVD chamber?
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/diamond-foundry-startup-lab-created-diamonds
The process occurring inside that chamber - the size of a bowling ball, which, with its round, bolted porthole window looks rather like a Jules Verne submarine - is known as chemical vapour deposition, or CVD. In simplest terms, as Scholz describes it, it’s the “act of growing a solid material from a gas”.
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