Here’s an opportunity for a new best friend for women worldwide: the second-largest diamond ever has been discovered at the Karowe mine in Botswana. The marvels of technology never cease to amaze, and avant-garde X-ray technology was employed by Canada’s Lucara Diamond Corp. to unearth a staggering 2,492-carat diamond.
Whether it yields top-quality gems is a question for another day, but what’s most astonishing is that this feat was accomplished over a century after the world’s largest diamond, the Cullinan Diamond (3,106 carats), was found and is not far behind in size.
Clearly, such marvelous discoveries happen once in a century, and it could only happen at Lucara’s Karowe mine, renowned for its giant stones. The company has not yet provided a value or quality assessment for this massive rough diamond. Lucara has broken its own record, as the largest diamond previously recovered by them in Botswana was a 1,758-carat stone named Sewelo in 2019. It was not known to be a gem-quality stone, and the same could be true for this new find.
Nonetheless, it is a significant achievement for the Canadian company, which accomplished the task using X-ray technology installed at the mine to identify high-value stones in the primary ore body, according to Bloomberg. This also spares the team from the arduous task of sifting through tons of waste rock to separate the gems. “The ability to recover such a massive, high-quality stone intact demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach to diamond recovery,” Lucara Chief Executive Officer William Lamb said in a statement.
