552-carat diamond found in Canada

The biggest diamond ever found in North America has been unearthed by Dominion Diamond Mines and Rio Tinto Group at a mine in Canada’s frozen north.

The 552-carat yellow gem was found at the Diavik mine in the Northwest Territories, and is almost three times the size of the next-largest stone ever found in Canada. While Diavik and the neighboring Ekati mine produce some very high-quality diamonds, they’re not renowned for the sort of large gems normally found in southern African mines.

Dominion Chief Executive Officer Shane Durgin said the diamond is gem quality, meaning it’s suitable for jewelry, but he gave few additional details that help determine its value.

“We can label it fancy yellow, but beyond that, due to its rough nature and the abrasions received through the processing facility, that’s all we can comment on,” Durgin said in an interview. “It’s very hard to give a ballpark estimate. It all depends on, again, the cutting and the resulting stone it ends up.”

The discovery is the seventh-biggest this century, according to Bloomberg calculations, and would be among the 30 largest stones ever unearthed. The biggest was the 3,106-carat Cullinan, found near Pretoria in South Africa in 1905. It was cut into several polished gems, the two largest of which — the Great Star of Africa and the Lesser Star of Africa — are set in the Crown Jewels of Britain.

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