18.96 Carat Pink Diamond
At the November meeting Keith Klein announced the news about a 18.96 carat pink diamond that sold for $50 million at a Christie’s auction in Geneva Switzerland. The diamond was known as the pink legacy diamond. This is a record price/carat for a diamond. To put the price in perspective this diamond weighs 3.8 grams and a penny weighs 3.1 grams.
Flawless pink diamonds are very rare and most of them weigh 0.1 carat or less. The pink legacy diamond has no other coloring which is also rare. Only 2% of all diamonds are pink and fewer than 10% of the pink diamonds are of this quality.
The attached photo is actually of the Graff Pink Diamond at 24.78 carats. The photo is by: Diamondhistorygirl [CC BY-SA 4.0 ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 )], from Wikimedia Commons
https://www.christies.com/features/The-Pink-Legacy-diamond-9398-3.aspx
Other articles this story is based on are:
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/christies-pink-legacy-diamond-scli-intl/index.html
552 Carat Yellow Diamond found at the Diavik Mine in Canada
In mid-December the Dominion Diamond Mine at Diavik in Canada reported that they had found a 552 Carat yellow diamond. The Diavik mine is in Canada’s Northwest Territory about 135 miles south of the Arctic Circle.
The diamond is about the size of a chicken egg and is the largest diamond ever found in North America and is one of the 30 largest diamonds ever found. Previously the largest diamond found in North America weighed in at 187.7 carats and was also found in the Diavik mine. Dominion Diamond Mines plans to have the rough diamond cut but cannot estimate the size of the resulting stone.
Sources: (all the sources had the same basic information)
www.mining.com/largest-diamond-north-america-found-canadas-diavik-mine/
https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/14/world/552-carat-diamond-found-in-canada/index.html
The Fifth Largest Ever Diamond is Found in January 2018
Keith Klein, Raffle Coordinator, pointed out at the April 2018 membership meeting that a 910 carat gem quality diamond had been found earlier this year. This is the 5th largest gem quality diamond that had ever been found. In a story reported by Stephanie Pappas of https://livescience.com Gem Diamonds, Ltd. announced on Jan 15th that they had found the stone in their Letseng mine in Lesotho Africa. 910 carats is 6.4 ounces or 40% of a pound. The mining company has named the diamond “The Lesotho Legend”. Philipp Heck, of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History said that the stone is of a high quality coveted by jewelers.
The Letseng mine is located in the small county of Lesotho which is totally landlocked by the country of South Africa. The Letseng mine is an open pit mine consisting of 2 carrot shaped kimberlite lava pipes (http://miningdataonline.com/property/1437/Letseng-Mine.aspx). Kimberlite pipes consist of igneous rock from deep in the mantle and has a high carbon dioxide concentration (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberlite). Kimberlite magma usually forms a carrot shaped vertical pipe and are rather rare. The primary source of natural diamonds tends to be these kimberlite magmas. The name kimberlite comes from the town of Kimberley in South Africa where a 83.5-carat diamond was found and started a diamond rush.