This diamond, the second largest in the world, was found Thursday in a mine in Botswana, in southern Africa. Aurélien Delaunay, director of the French Gemmology Laboratory, discusses this discovery on franceinfo.
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It barely fits in the palm of a hand, yet it weighs half a kilo and is worth 2,492 carats. A diamond of exceptional size, the second largest in the world, has been discovered in a mine in Botswana, Africa. The Canadian mining company Lucara announced it on Thursday, August 22. According to several sources, cited by the Financial Timesit could be worth more than $40 million. It was discovered thanks to a recent technology using X-rays, which allow the extraction of the largest precious stones from the ground without breaking them. A method that could, according to several experts, eventually allow the discovery of other very large diamonds.
At the risk of seeing the value of these stones drop? Not very likely according to Aurélien Delaunay, director of the French Gemmology Laboratory, interviewed on franceinfo on Friday. “There is a global price that exists with prices that are issued. The fact of finding more and more of them is not really going to have an impact on these prices. These stones, as important as they are, remain exceptional and we are not going to find hundreds of them either.”he believes.
“The demand for diamonds remains high because you have a lot of symbols that are linked to that: symbol of eternity, love and power.continues the director of the French Gemology Laboratory. And when you buy a diamond, you buy everything around it, that is to say a natural stone that was therefore created in the bowels of the earth, which has a history. People will continue to buy diamonds for all that.”
The largest known diamond in the world remains the “Cullinan”, weighing over 1,300 carats, discovered in South Africa in 1905, cut into several pieces. The largest of these were set in the British Crown Jewels.
