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Just increased my holding +33.3%
At 342 ct this is an absolute whopper, and Type IIa (from 1000 km deep mantle!)
What we were expecting?
The big blues have come from a depth of ~1000 km and they are ~2.3 billion years old. The few we've seen look like they are broken from a larger primordial crystal from the deep. The speed of travel up the last 300 km of the kimberlite is incredibly fast and dangerous. What is clear is that the kimberlite ore recently recovered does not have these big blues, but one has to bear in mind that the statistics are inadequate. The marketing / auction of the last three or four left a lot to be desired in terms of failure to push the unique selling features.
The price seems to have been in a random walk so far this month. What is everyone scared of? It's quite some time, I know, since we had a find of geological significance. Where are we with the Tanzanian seizures and the erratic power supply? Neither inspires confidence.
I'm at an international scientific meeting and what I am putting in the email is in the public domain. GIA scientists have given two presentions on what deep diamonds tell us about the history of our planetBlue diamonds come from deeper in the Earth's mantle than is the case for other diamonds. They formed about 2 billion years ago, so they are the oldest examples we have. Their inclusions are samples of the mantle as it was 2 billion years ago. Isotopic examination of the light elements in the inclusions allows us to recover some information on conditions in the atmosphere. The boron responsible for the blue colour is from subducted ocean floor, taken down to the mantle via the subducting slab. Some of the carbon that made the diamond is organic carbon from the surface. So the blue diamonds are exciting capsules of Earth history. I wouldn't be surprised if this one goes for a record price (per carat) for an uncut blue. And I wouldn't be surprised if there are more of the same.
On these posts, I only write about what I know about, in the context of my knowledge of kimberlite and the geology of diamond. Type IIa diamonds are absolutely exceptional being devoid or almost devoid of any impurities. The blue ones are extremely rare. Given that the 29 ct blue went for $48m in 2015, $40m is not out of the question for this beauty, which looks deep blue in the photograph. The Cullinan Mine seems to be probing kimberlite that is exceptionally rich in biggies. More of the same please, and soonest
Ouch!
I am new to this game - this is my tenth post. What's the point in traders selling 1 share? or 13? I am biding my time for the next big crystal of deep carbon Type IIa ... Same nonsense going on at ABM: CEO just spent 25 pence to add 47 to his bundle of 18 million!
Where is everyone?
What's the point of buying 5 for £1 (16.29 today) ??
Currently, there is a desperate shortage of aircraft for the UK summer package holiday trade because of the grounding of the 737 Max, which isn't going to go away overnight.
Yes I too was surprised about the lowish $15m. However ... the cutters and polishers are eyeing by the super-rich. The demand for heavyweight gems may be declining, given the negative sentiment swirling around oil-rich states: Iran, UAE, Saudi Arabia, plus the ongoing concerns about money-laundering involving Russia etc etc. What I am saying is that the rough diamond might not have fetched as much as some hoped, because Antwerp could be worried that in 3 years time the number of buyers for the highest priced gemstones might not exist.
I have assumed BR has been selling selling selling because as a fund manager they need to crystalise their losses and rinse the red ink from their portfolios. Wouldn't be at all surprised if in a few weeks they start buying back. Related to this, the record diamond found by Lucara is definitely not Type IIa so it won't fetch anything like the same price per carat as the PDL Type IIa diamonds found recently. Incidentally, these are some of the deepest sourced diamonds ever, formed at least 550 km down in the mantle. All of this is public knowledge BTW
The geology of kimberlite is that deep carbon in the form of the diamond can be scooped up from the lower mantle in such a way that it samples different parts of the mantle. It is well established that diamonds of ages 1 byr, 2 byr and 3 byr can be found (very rarely) in different realms of the same kimberlite. Now I am wildly speculating, but it is possible that Petra is mining kimberlite where an enormous ore of crystalline deep carbon got smashed up as it ascended in a mantle plume that led to a kimberlite pipe. The track record of Cullinan is second to none
Thank you for that gracious clarification. I've just been reading an academic paper published in 2015: Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology 170: 36. This is about lab experiments to see how conditions in the kimberlite mantle affect the appearance of the diamond surface under high magnification. The important conclusion is that diamond growth / quality varies strongly with depth in the kimberlite. So, the significance of this is that PDL may have hit a sweet spot. because they've found similar subtypes of high quality diamond in succession. But again, this is no more than speculation on my part. Disclosure: Author of paper is Yana Fedortchouk/ Dalhousie Univ. Publisher Springer.
It's a statement that the price-sensitive facts are not the result of insider information. If you read the T&Cs of the Comments feature you'll see this is a requirement. I am a geoscience professional.
The finds announced in March appear to be of CLIPPER Type IIa diamonds: large, inclusion-poor, relatively pure. These are extremely rare (in terms of the geology of diamond). They are formed at a depth of 410 - 660 km in the mantle. It's possible that the mining operations are now tapping into a zone in the kimberlite that has more fragments (the rough stones have clearly fractured from a much larger mass of crystallized carbon). It's also possible that at Cullinan and Letšeng improvements in the recovery and recognition techniques are coming into play now that they've realised the kimberlite rough diamonds > 100 ct. All a bit of a gamble, but it only needs a couple of handfuls of these stones to wipe out the debts at Petra. All of the science in this posting can be found in public domain journals such as Science (2016) and Gems & Gemology (2017)