As reported byBloomberg Quint , one of the biggest diamond in history – the fifth biggest , as it so happens – has been see , this time from within the Letšeng mine in the kingdom of Lesotho , a humble landlocked nation in southern Africa .
Diamonds are usually measured inweights , with one “ carat ” adequate to 200 milligrams – to you and I , a most imperceptible weight . This new diamond weighs 910 kt , equivalent to 182 grams ( 6.4 ounces ) , which is roughly the same as ahamster , two standard deck of cards , or three - fifths as weighty as the average adult human heart .
The cock-a-hoop rhomb ever found was the 3,106 - carat ( 621 - gram/1.37 - Irish pound ) Cullinan , found in South Africa in 1905 .
The prescribed story fromGem Diamonds – which owns 70 percent of the Letšeng mine – notes that it ’s a D color Type IIa diamond , which have in mind that it ’s incredibly staring , containing few N atoms . This means that when it ’s sell , it will likely convey one of the highest price for a baseball field in the domain .
Bloomberg notes that another diamond from the mine , 2006 ’s 603 - carat uncut “ Lesotho Promise ” , sold for$12.4 million . In fact , the mine is the high dollar mark value per carat diamond mine in the world .
Like mass of ball field mines , Letšeng is volcanic in origin . The mine is digging down into a kimberlite , a unknown volcanic feature part of a wider course of volcano namedmaar - diatremes .
kimberlite are especially weird . Generally only appear in the oldest continental crust on the planet , the magma arrest within these tube was once incredibly hot , unbelievably fluid , and very colicky .
As direct out byWired , the CO2 - plenteous foam ahead of the magma is so buoyant that it ends up move at amphetamine of 1,000 kilometer ( 621 miles ) per hour , faster than a rider jet . The magma within them originates from late below the crust , within the otherwise substantial , superheated mantle .
These ancient eruptions do n’t happen anymore , and it ’s potential that their violence and deep - rout source magma was a product of a once much hotter chimneypiece .
Diamonds take form deeply beneath the crust too,1 to 3 billion yr ago – not from coal , by the way , but from extremely compress , profoundly heatedcarbon - rich depositsin narrow constancy regions within the upper mantle .
Kimberlite eruptions pass to fetch up chunks of the upper mantle with them to the aerofoil , and within these alien rocks – these xenolith – you may get diamonds . Fascinatingly , we bonk the eruption process has to happen in a matter of hours ; a slower extravasation would provide them to gradually rearrange their chemical structureinto graphite .
Letšeng ’s succeeder is partly down to the fact that it sits on aseriesof kimberlite pipe , which rest above a part of the upper mantle once absolutely suited for grow diamonds .
