An Enormous 442-Carat Diamond Worth Up To $18 Million Was Just Found

iStockphoto / RobertKacpura

Have you ever paused for a moment and pondered how there are people out there digging up gold and diamonds literally right now as I type out this sentence and they’re essentially making money materialize out of thin air and this is something we could all be doing if we wanted to? They’re just sitting there in the ground waiting to be found.

I like money. Why am I not the one finding these diamonds? What TF in life stopped me from becoming a miner or prospector because I really think I would’ve thrived at that occupation.

Gem Diamonds Ltd. announced last week that they’d found the 442-carat diamond at their Letseng mine in Lesotho, a landlocked country that is surrounded by South Africa. The diamond is estimated to be worth up to $18 million and it was just sitting there in the ground waiting for someone to find it!

It’s hard to know exactly how much this diamond will be worth because a stone that size, 442 carats!!!, will be cut and cleaned up into smaller diamonds. The mining company that found this stone, Gem Diamonds Ltd., has a recent history of finding gargantuan diamonds worth a literal fortune. Just two years ago they pulled up a 910-carat diamond ‘the size of two golf balls’ which went on to sell for $40 million, according to Bloomberg.

The diamond industry has been hit as hard by the pandemic as any industry out there so it will be quite interesting to see what becomes of this particular stone.

The find comes as the global diamond industry has been brought to its knees by the pandemic. Jewelry stores have closed and India’s cutting industry, which handles almost all of the world’s stones, has come to a halt. The miners that dominate the industry, De Beers and Russian rival Alrosa PJSC, have seen their rough diamond sales collapse.

“The recovery of this remarkable 442 carat diamond, one of the world’s largest gem quality diamonds to be recovered this year, is further confirmation of the caliber of the Letseng mine and its ability to consistently produce large, high quality diamonds,” Clifford Elphick, Gem’s chief executive officer, said in the statement. (via)

Here’s a look at that 910-carat diamond they found two years ago at the Letseng Diamonds mine in Lesotho which is now the ‘highest dollar per carat kimberlite diamond mine in the world’.

If you want to read the full press release from Gem Diamonds Ltd. about the finding of this 442-carat diamond you can click right here and head on over to their website.