Finding colored diamonds is rare, which is why these diamonds are even more expensive than the colorless bling often referred to as a woman’s best friend.
Pink diamonds are so rare that 90 percent of all colored gems come from a single mine in Australia that is now closed. Now researchers have found the key to why this mine contained the rare stones. The hope is that this knowledge will help diamond hunters find new colored diamonds.
Argyle diamond mine closed in November 2020, after 37 years in operation. As of 2018, it had produced 14 million carats of diamonds. Few of these had the qualities to become jewelry diamonds, but a small part of the jewelry was pink, red, and even blue.
The diamond ring shown at the top of this article – the Williamson Pink Star diamond – was sold at auction in Hong Kong in October 2022. The price was then almost 58 million dollars, i.e. approximately NOK 625 million. It set a record for price per carat.
The demand for these colored diamonds is therefore sky high. Now scientists have examined the diamond deposits from the Argyle mine, gaining a better understanding of the geological conditions that created these colored diamonds.
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The team under supercontinent
Diamonds are made from carbon under enormous pressure deep below the earth. Most diamonds are made just below the continental plates – between 150 and 300 kilometers below the surface. But there is a difference in how diamonds are made, and there is also a difference between the type of carbon they are made from. Therefore, there is a great variety in diamonds.
By using a laser to analyze minerals and rocks extracted from the Argyle deposit, the researchers have found more knowledge about the conditions needed for the Earth to be able to produce the pink, red and blue diamonds, and bring them to the surface so that they can extracted from the earth’s crust.
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The colored diamonds from Australia were brought to the surface during the breakup of the supercontinent Columbia 1.3 billion years ago. Although the continent that would become Australia did not break away from Colombia 1.3 billion years ago, the area where Argyle was subjected to enormous stresses during this period.
The ingredients
– Argyle is located at the point where the Kimberley region and the rest of northern Australia crashed together a long time ago. That kind of scar in the earth’s crust never fully heals. While the continent that would become Australia did not break up, the area where Argyle is located was stretched, including along the scar, which created holes in the earth’s crust so that magma could shoot up to the surface, bringing with it pink diamonds, explains lead author of the study Dr. Hugo Oil smoke. He is a fellow at Curtin University’s John de Laeter Center in Perth, Australia, according to, among others EurekAlert!
They therefore believe that three ingredients are necessary for it to be possible to find colored diamonds:
That there are first deposits of carbon far down in the globe, That this carbon is subjected to stress by continental plates being pressed together, That the continental plates are then pulled apart so that the diamonds can be transported to the surface with magma.
– As long as these three ingredients are present – deep Carboniferous, continental collision and then stretching – we believe it will be possible to find “the next Argyle mine”, which was once the world’s largest source of natural diamonds, says Olierook.
The study was on Tuesday published in the journal Nature Communications.
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2023-09-24 11:19:21
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