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Quadrillion tons of diamonds

A Ton of Diamonds – for Everyone



A Ton of Diamonds – for Everyone A new study, just published in the journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, claims to have found the mother lode – quadrillion tons of diamonds. To put that number into a more understandable perspective; it equates to 1,000,000,000,000,000 tons (I’m using metric tons, i.e. 1,000 kg), hence 1,000 kg/ton, times 1,000 g/kg, times 4 carat/g, and it all comes to a cool 4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 carat of diamonds (possibly in liquid form at a zillion degrees mixed in magma).
With a world population of (rounded up) 10,000,000,000, that would equate to 400,000,000,000 carat per every man, woman, and child on earth. Of course, not every diamond is perfect in colour, clarity, and size. So, let’s make some guesstimate adjustments: Colour In its purest form, diamonds consist solely of carbon atoms in a particular atomic arrangement and are colourless. Colour is produced by miniscule imperfections of other elements or small defects in the diamond structure. However, colour preferences may be a personal choice and, in recent years, various coloured stones were propagated as more desirable than others. For arguments’ sake, let me assume that only 10% (but of that 10% only 20 to 30 % can actually be cut) of raw diamonds are colourless. Clarity Many natural diamonds have inclusions, mostly consisting of graphite (another form of carbon). If such inclusions can be detected under a jeweler’s loupe with 10-times magnification, the inclusions reduce the diamonds’ desirability. For arguments’ sake, let me assume that only 1% of raw diamonds are without such inclusions. Other inclusions include fracture feathers, two and three phase inclusions and foreign material: such as “phantom crystals” of other minerals. Size Clearly, size matters. The largest (raw) diamonds ever found were in the order of 1,000 to 3,000 carat (Cullinan Diamond). Stones of such size are extremely rare. Wikipedia lists only three diamonds ever found with a weight of over 1,000 carat. In the range of 200 to 1,000 carat, the count is in the hundreds, with a major portion of that from the Cullinan Diamond Mine in South Africa. In modern times, however, many mines have adjusted their mining and sorting equipment to allow the passage of larger material and, thus, prevent breaking larger diamonds that would have been broken earlier.

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A typical size distribution chart of diamonds from mines is shown in the graph, credit: Saskatchewan Research Council. As an aside, perhaps buying an operating diamond mine is a good investment after all (De Beers Makes Rare Acquisition with Canadian Diamond Mine ) and who says that there isn’t money in “diamond pollution”? As you can see, to the right of the red-dotted line (that demarks the one carat size), the frequency of occurrence falls even faster than the size. A one order of magnitude increase in size decreases the frequency of finds by approximately two orders of magnitude. Saskatchewan Research Council: Diamonds So, let’s be generous and say that raw one-carat (or larger) diamonds constitute just 0.1 % of the natural occurrence. Now, let’s compute the number of colourless, inclusion-free, at least one-carat size raw diamonds, using the above adjustments:
[10%] x 0.01 [1%] x 0.001 [0.1%] = 0.000,001 Or, one in a million.
Reducing then the potentially available carats per world inhabitant (above) by that factor still leaves the astounding number of 400,000 carat of high quality and sizable diamonds per each of earth’s inhabitants. Just in weight alone, that comes roughly to ONE TON OF QUALITY DIAMONDS per every person. Needless to say, most “significant others” are elated and the monopolist-in-charge is equally perturbed. Before you jump with Joy Sorry dear Readers, I forgot to mention some details: It’s all just conjecture on the basis of some “anomalous” sound waves and, in any event, those little gems are all deep down in the earth’s crust, well below current and foreseeable technologies to harvest them.


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Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser -- Bio and Archives

Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser is author of CONVENIENT MYTHS, the green revolution – perceptions, politics, and facts Convenient Myths


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