Botswana unearths second-largest diamond in the world

A mining company has announced the discovery of a giant 1,174-carat diamond in Botswana, the second-largest diamond to be discovered in the country in recent weeks.

The 77mm in length, 55mm in width, and 33mm thick diamond was discovered in the Karowe diamond mine last month, according to the mining company, Lucara Diamond Corp. On Wednesday, the company handed the diamond to the government in a ceremony.

It’s the third diamond over 1,000 carats discovered at the location, and it’ll be turned into “valuable collections of top colour polished diamonds,” according to Lucara Diamond, a Canadian mining company.

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On Wednesday, Botswana’s President, Mokgweetsi Masisi, attended a ceremony to examine the stone. Lucara Botswana’s managing director, Naseem Lahri, said the finding is history in the making, for us and Botswana as well.”

According to Lucara, the stone is “a clivage gem of variable quality with significant domains of high-quality white gem material.”

Prior to the finding of the mega diamond, diamond business Debswana unearthed another massive 1,098-carat precious stone in Botswana, which was then thought to be the world’s third-largest gem-quality stone ever dug. 

In 2015, the world’s second-largest diamond, the 1,758-carat “Lesedi La Rona,” was discovered in the Karowe mine in Botswana.

The 3,106-carat Cullinan Diamond, discovered in South Africa in 1905, is now the biggest diamond ever reported. The Cullinan was then split into smaller stones, some of which are now part of the crown jewels of the British royal family.

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Small diamonds, weighing less than one carat, account for the great bulk of world diamond production. Small diamonds are ubiquitous, but they’re only valuable in industrial settings. Large gemstone-quality diamonds, on the other hand, are exceedingly uncommon and valuable.

According to an article in The Conversation, natural diamonds originated billions of years ago deep in the Earth, and some experts believe there are huge quantities of gem-quality stones hundreds of kilometres underground. The deepest hole ever sunk, according to the researchers Jodie Bradby and Nigel Marks, is roughly 12 kilometres deep, and we will never be able to extract these deep-earth diamonds.