910-carat diamond a doozy of a Valentine
Feb. 14 is the prime time to buy a rock of any size
When Feb. 14 approaches each year, the thoughts of many Americans in love turn to diamonds.
Nearly 20% of 2018 Valentine’s Day gift-givers plan to spend a total of $4.7 billion on jewelry, up 9.3% from 2017, National Retail Federation survey data show.
The day that might or might not be named for a saint named Valentine falls during the four-month period from November through February dubbed “Proposal Season” by The Knot, an online site that helps couples plan weddings. February accounted for 7% of the engagements in The Knot’s 2017 Real Weddings survey.
Sticking with decades of recent U.S. tradition, 88% of the couples surveyed for the site’s 2017 Jewelry & Engagement study opted for engagement rings with white diamonds as the center stone.
“They’re far and away the most popular,” said Shelley Brown, fashion and beauty editor for The Knot.
With that in mind, here’s a story that may inspire those who plan to give a loved one a diamond (or those who hope to get one). Like many stories, it begins both far away and long ago.
Kingdom of Lesotho
It’s summer now in Lesotho, a landlocked African nation of more than 1.9 million people and roughly 11,720 square miles that’s surrounded by South Africa.
Lesotho’s mining employment has declined in recent years. Yet one active strip mine, owned by London-based Gem Diamonds and Lesotho’s government in a respective 70%-to-30% partnership, has repeatedly set the global diamond industry abuzz in recent years.
Located at an elevation of roughly
9,900 feet in the Maloti Mountains of northern Lesotho, the Letšeng mine is the world’s highest diamond mine. It is also the world’s highest-achieving U.S. dollar-per-carat diamond mine, according to Gem Diamonds.
In mid-January, the Letšeng mine produced a rare find: a 910-carat diamond, roughly equivalent to the size of two golf balls.
Even rarer, Gem Diamonds said the find is classified as a D-color Type II diamond, the highest color and purestquality ratings.
Rarest of all, the Letšeng mine since
2006 has produced more than 60 gems of at least 100 carats, predominantly high-value, white diamonds.
“There’s no doubt that this is unusual for one mine, especially because it’s such a low-yield production,” said Tom Moses, senior vice president of the Gemological Institute of America, an organization that’s a global authority on diamonds, colored stones and pearls. “It’s a freak of nature.”
The Letšeng Mine
Why have so many eye-popping diamonds been found here? It’s difficult to determine with certainty, gem experts say.
However, Evan Smith, a Gemological Institute of America research scientist, has a promising theory. He’s devoted his work to studying rare diamonds and characterizing their inclusions — the tiny imperfections typically found inside or on the surfaces of virtually all diamonds.
The GIA says diamonds are believed to have been formed “billions of years ago through a combination of tremendous pressure and temperatures of 1,652–2,372 degrees Fahrenheit at depths between 90 and 120 miles beneath Earth’s surface.”
The stones later are pushed nearer the Earth’s surface by volcanic activity.
But the diamonds recovered at the Letšeng mine are different, according to studies during the past two years by Smith and fellow researchers at the Carnegie Institue for Science and the University of Padua.
The very large stones contain tiny, iron-rich inclusions surrounded by a fluid jacket of methane and hydrogen, the researchers wrote in a peer-reviewed study recently published in Gem & Gemology, a GIA scientific journal. The metals typically are not found in other diamonds.
The findings indicate that the Letšeng mine’s larger stones likely were formed roughly 224 miles to 466 miles below the earth’s surface, deeper than the planet’s shifting tectonic plates, Smith said in an interview.
“Those big diamonds are genetically different,” said Smith. “They really do form a population of their own.”
Additionally, Gem Diamonds and other gem-mining companies increas- ingly use X-ray-like technology right at their excavation facilities. This helps locate large diamond stones within large blocks of ore and raw material.
“This is part of an effort to capture the diamonds before they’re broken up into much smaller pieces” by the mines’ mechanical crushers, said Michael Marty, director of diamond supply management for Blue Nile, a Seattle-based online diamond jeweler and a global leader for wedding rings.
How much?
So, what’s the likely sale price of a high-quality, 910-carat diamond?
Gem Diamonds declined to say. And several major diamond companies in the U.S. and Europe did not respond to USA TODAY messages.
Marty, who estimates he sees tens of thousands of diamonds every year as part of his job, explained that the silence likely stems from the way the world diamond market handles rare finds.
“You don’t want to create a market for the stone until you’ve identified the right customer because there are so few customers for these types of items,” he said. “You have to create a market before you put a price tag on the stone. It’s kind of like a stock offering in some ways.”
Marty ventured that the diamond might sell for $50 million to $75 million and estimated it could be cut to produce 10 to 30 stones of various sizes.