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How a Rogue Geologist Discovered Diamonds
prone2tech writes "Both NPR and Wired are running stories about how nearly two decades ago, a dogged, absentminded Canadian geologist named Charles Fipke who was practically down to his last nickel when he discovered diamonds in the Northwest Territories. Back then there was no such thing as a Canadian diamond, and today, Canada is the world's third-largest producer. The story behind the addition of Canada to the ranks of diamond-producing nations leads back to this one man. His discovery started the largest staking rush in North America since George Carmack found gold in the Klondike a century earlier."
Seems a little unfair to call the guy a 'rogue' or 'absent minded'. He's an intelligent bloke who applied his knowledge and intellect to a problem, spent nearly a decade doing the necessary legwork, and eventually hit the big time when it all paid off. That's not 'rogue' behaviour, that's hard work. I'd have given up. Well done to him. He deserves it.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
he's a shining example of some who works really hard!
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
Aaaaand now that we can make pretty much perfect diamonds as large as you want with a fairly inexpensive vapor deposition chamber, all this will soon be no more than a waste of money, time and energy.
I love how the diamond industry used to derogate diamonds with flaws, but now they push them as evidence of "natural" diamonds.
- I can add flaws to the diamonds in the vapor dep chamber, too!
Now we can make better diamonds than nature. I suggest we use use diamonds as carbon sequestering to prevent global warming! ;)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I'm Canadian, I consider myself a bit of a "rogue", and I was down to my last diamond when I discovered nickle in Northern Ontario
why are diamonds still considered precious?
don't we have the technology to make them cheap?
sure, there's all the convoluted diamond market, debeers monopoly explanations, but that's like saying no one can buy marijuana because its illegal
if i want to get a diamond, why can't i pay $5 and go get one the size of my fist? its just carbon. that i can't do that right now, seems absurd to me, and even more absurd, that we should still be digging this stuff up and considering it valuable
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...if you assholes wielding the "!news" tag would just relax and perhaps even just fuck the hell off for the holidays. This site covers a *broad* range of geeky interests, and not every single post has to be "ZOMG! Zoobuntu fork Humpty Hump just added support for a third mouse button and a reverse-engineered hacked driver for the 3DFX card! w00t!"
Seriously. Some of us leave the house sometimes, you jackasses.
His discovery started the largest staking rush in North America since George Carmack found gold in the Klondike a century earlier.
As opposed to George's descendent who started the largest exodus of a planet when he opened a portal to hell.
Summation 2
"That in some fields of his country there are certain shining stones of several colours, whereof the Yahoos are violently fond: and when part of these stones is fixed in the earth, as it sometimes happens, they will dig with their claws for whole days to get them out; then carry them away, and hide them by heaps in their kennels; but still looking round with great caution, for fear their comrades should find out their treasure." My master said, "he could never discover the reason of this unnatural appetite, or how these stones could be of any use to a Yahoo; but now he believed it might proceed from the same principle of avarice which I had ascribed to mankind. That he had once, by way of experiment, privately removed a heap of these stones from the place where one of his Yahoos had buried it; whereupon the sordid animal, missing his treasure, by his loud lamenting brought the whole herd to the place, there miserably howled, then fell to biting and tearing the rest, began to pine away, would neither eat, nor sleep, nor work, till he ordered a servant privately to convey the stones into the same hole, and hide them as before; which, when his Yahoo had found, he presently recovered his spirits and good humour, but took good care to remove them to a better hiding place, and has ever since been a very serviceable brute."
In Colorado people are constantly looking for oil, gold, uranium, diamonds, etc. Few get lucky. Much of the easy stuff was found in the 19th century.
Some new gold mines were discovered in California by petroleum geologists. They discovered buried riverbeds where placer gold concentrates using petroleum seismic sections.
Seems a little unfair to call the guy a 'rogue' or 'absent minded'. He's an intelligent bloke who applied his knowledge and intellect to a problem, spent nearly a decade doing the necessary legwork, and eventually hit the big time when it all paid off. That's not 'rogue' behaviour, that's hard work. I'd have given up. Well done to him. He deserves it.
I agree wholeheartedly. This wasn't a get rich quick story. It was somebody who worked hard to become rich.
The story is actually more interesting than the Wired story says. For years geologists had been finding raw diamonds in the NWT, and had been going nuts trying to find where they were coming from. The real breakthrough was realising what a kimberlite pipe would look like out in the tundra, sorting out the geology that went along with it, then examining likely sites. Many of these are now well-known names, like Ekati and Diavik.
I too wish these folks well.
...laura
Sure a rogue/geologist sounds pretty cool, but multi-classing is not a smart decision. You're better off just focusing all your levels in one class.
If the geiger counter does not click, the coffee, she is not thick.
Big deal, my rogue mines all kinds of cool things. Maybe the next story can be how a hunter found rugged leather or a priest found goldthorn.
for 10 minutes, and she had her blinker on the whole time
it made me so angry, at a stop light i got out my car and beat the shit out of her
not really
but i think you might know the feeling
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
like an iridium or palladium or rhodium ring
it will be many, many moons before we'll be able to synthesize these elements relatively cheaply via radioactive decay or find some relatively cheaply exploitable extraplanetary source
meanwhile, you will have bought her something genuinely rare, valuable, and expensive, which is what a diamond ring is suppose to symbolize in a relationship as an investment
meanwhile, diamonds are the symbols of monopoly, conflict, and falsely inflated value. which is not the symbol of love in a relationship you or her are looking for (although perhaps a valid symbol for many relationships out there, there's a joke in there somewhere, ehem)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Fortunately, diamonds will sell for ten dollars per carat in the year 2015. All of us will benefit from inexpensive, flawless diamonds. Computers will become faster and less expensive. Advanced medical equipment will become available to more people. Photovoltaic cells made from diamonds will bring cheap power to the masses. What an exciting time to be alive!
he must have been a Dwarf Rogue, that way he could use find treasure.
. . . has as already become uncomfortable competition for de Beers: http://www.khulsey.com/jewelry/kh_jewelry_diamond_mines_russia.html
I remember reading that, eventually, Russia reach a, um, "deal" with de Beers. It is in their interest, as well, to artificially inflate the price.
But despite all this, de Beers seems to always remain de Beers.
After all, "a monopoly is forever."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
that rare and valuable also implied price stability?
i don't think gold's enormous price fluctuations have convinced people to stop buying gold
if something is rare, its rare. no price fluxuation is going to change that fact
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
the teaser for this story is bad. it really has nothing to do with the guy who discovered it, and is more about the industry itself. the story doesn't even say if the guy who discovered it is reasonably successful or not. blah.
It's a mass grave.
I saw a show about this a few years back (I wish I could remember the channel it was on). Why are NPR and Wired only now talking about it? It certainly is an interesting story, though.
If we don't protect the freedom of speech how will we know who the assholes are?
The Geologist (actually "Archaeologist") class never existed in Rogue. I don't even think Rogue had diamonds. Sheez.
Come on editors! You gotta catch this stuff!
One hundred and fifty years ago, pure aluminum was as expensive as gold. Then someone came out and discovered that if you heat aluminum oxide until it is molten, and use electrolysis, you can generate as much pure aluminum as you want, cheap enough to wrap left over foods and threw it away afterward.
..stealth to the back of the cave?
The diamond mines were featured in the first season of "Ice Road Truckers". The mines get supplied with their heavy equipment a few months in mid-winter when an ice highway is maintained across frozen lakes and rivers in the region. Watching someone drive 80 tons of mining equipment over a frozen lake is an amazing thing.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Did anyone else read that as "John Carmack found gold in the Klondike a century earlier"? Maybe he drove one of his Ferraris at 88 mph and travelled through time to ge the gold, which he then used to buy the Ferrari?
There are enough companies that produce "industrial" diamonds for many uses. They can also produce diamonds the size of the largest found diamonds.
And they nowadays have such a high quality, that the sole thing that lets you detect the difference, is that natural diamonds have more errors in them.
Industrial diamonds cost next to nothing compared to natural diamonds. But De Beers & co want you to believe that natural diamonds are somewhat special, while even real natural diamonds are not that rare at all.
If you want to buy real rare stones as a gift, buy rubies, sapphires, emeralds, opals and the like. Or naturally colored diamonds (black, red maybe?). They are fuckin' expensive. But here it's because they are really rare.
I for one, do not buy something like that at all. There's no real value in rare stones for me, and if I don't want to sell them to someone who thinks they are valuable...
I like to buy personal gifts. And I like to only buy gifts, if the person does not expect a gift. Otherwise it's nothing special anymore.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Diamond grit, as an abrasive, is currently around $0.07/carat in bulk. It's almost all synthetic, not hard to make, and used for a wide variety of cutting tools. Synthetic diamond production is about 100x mined production. The glamour has gone out of diamond; it's now what sewer workers use on their cutting tools when they need to slice through cement pavement.
CMU has a new process for microwave-annealing diamonds to remove flaws and make colorless synthetic diamonds.
The diamond industry (i.e. DeBeers) painted themselves into a corner, by taking the position that that "flawless" diamonds are the most valuable. That's not where you want to be positioned going up against the industries that make semiconductor wafers.
This all happened to sapphires about sixty years ago. Sapphires used to be rare and valuable. Then Linde Chemical started synthesizing them, and destroyed the market. Now you can buy sapphire bar stock and transparent sapphire plates for supermarket checkout scanners. Since then, it's happened to rubies and emeralds. Now, cheap diamonds.
Perhaps Marlene wasn't getting enough attention, what with Charles working so hard. So she got herself a little Stu on the side, and Charles decided to not put up with either of them? Plausible.
History Channel ran a story about him in Modern Marvels - it was a good show and if you can, you should watch the show to see the DeBeers vs Small Man battle and some other cool theories he has on geological/ice drift that prompted him to look below the ice based on patterns of deposits from a glacier. Very interesting stuff indeed - despite all the rants - this is a good topic about innovation, forward thinking and the challenge of David vs. Goliath in modern terms... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0877223/ http://www.amazon.com/History-Modern-Marvels-Diamond-Mines/dp/B001CU9486 http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=4&url=http%3A%2F%2Fthepiratebay.org%2Ftorrent%2F3592588%2FModern_Marvels_-_Diamond_Mines&ei=lbFCSeKZPNG3tweKqP3TCA&usg=AFQjCNFANj1cetx6DEkhjYL2v1NJmGwaVA&sig2=rvJ3z4L9GKhe_vyIQZn02w
NOT.
Stuff That's Very OLD
I read the book in 2002.
Cordially,
Kilgore Trout
I thought the American dream was "get a mortgage and own property": they tried to make land-owner status accessible to everyone.
$META_SIG_JOKE
Fipke is a small man with a shaved head, a burnished tan, piercing blue eyes, and forearms like Popeye's. As a kid, his frantic start-stop mind made people think he was stupid. After getting his high school girlfriend pregnant, he agreed to marry her ... and then failed to show up for the wedding. (The couple eventually married after the baby was born.) He stutters and says "hey" in almost every sentence. He frequently loses his glasses and his keys, shows up late to appointments, and has a history of spending prodigious amounts of money in strip joints. His nicknames have included Captain Chaos and Stumpy.
. . . welcome stumpy as one of us!
did what? there's no action clause here; they're all turned into adjective clauses about Fipke. go ahead, diagram it for me. you could just remove "who" or "when he" and it'd make perfect sense.
on the up side, this now removes any doubt as to whether grammar on slashdot is getting worse or i'm getting more persnickety: it's me.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Let's keep in mind that multinational mining conglomerates are easily some of the most corrupt, soul-destroying organizations in the world. For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Bougainville#Shutting_the_Panguna_mine
...Oh wait, that was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Never mind.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The map in Wired is *way* off. It places the mines too far north. Three of them are almost in the Arctic Ocean (they should be near Slave lake) and the fourth is on Baffin Island (should be in Ontario). Here are the correct locations:
Diavik mine - the satellite image is early in the mining operation, before the pit was dug (it is in the lake to the east).
Ekati mine - to the NW of Diavik. Google Maps shows one pit open. There is higher-resolution imagery in Google Earth that shows three pits.
Snap Lake mine - this one is owned by DeBeers.
Victor mine - also owned by DeBeers, there isn't much to see except muskeg in this part of northern Ontario. Apparently the picture was taken before the mine was opened.
Both NPR and Wired are running stories about how nearly two decades ago, a dogged, absent minded Canadian geologist named Charles Fipke who was practically down to his last nickel when he discovered diamonds in the Northwest Territories.
Does anybody read these submissions ?
What happened when he discovered these diamonds ? I get the "who was" and "when" but what happened nearly 2 decades ago ? Why should I invent the rest or follow links to find out what a sentence means ? Lose the "who" or it doesn't make sense.
Does anyone have a link to the article about the rogue gynecologist that discovered diamonds?
"Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the f-ing Peace Corps." - John 'Bluto' Blutarsky
There is a great 3-part documentary titled "Diamond Road" put together by SBS (Australian I think?). You can find some torrents for it via mvgroup. They go into some of the geopolitical/economic issues around diamond trade, including some of the Canadian mines.
People always bring up the McDonalds coffee suit as an example of frivolous lawsuits, but if you read up on it - it is anything but. Here, read this.
Here are some noteworthy bits from the link:
For years, McDonald's had known they had a problem with the way they make their coffee - that their coffee was served much hotter (at least 20 degrees more so) than at other restaurants.
McDonald's knew its coffee sometimes caused serious injuries - more than 700 incidents of scalding coffee burns in the past decade have been settled by the Corporation - and yet they never so much as consulted a burn expert regarding the issue.
The woman involved in this infamous case suffered very serious injuries - third degree burns on her groin, thighs and buttocks that required skin grafts and a seven-day hospital stay.
So the lawsuit actually did make sense, McDonalds really did screw up. They knew they were hurting people, they had a history of hurting people, and they didn't care. And the lady in question had third degree burns around her genitals from a cup of coffee. Dunno about you, but $480k minus hospital bills isn't *nearly* enough to have someone do burn grafts around my genitals.
I'm not meaning to stomp on you, and I hope it doesn't come off that way. Honest. It's just that the McDonalds coffee case is always quoted as an example of frivolous litigation, and it absolutely isn't. I used to say the same thing you did and someone (in fact, it happened here on /.) corrected me about it. So I do the same whenever it seems appropriate.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I investigated getting a diamond but they are, as another poster mentioned, not rare and not valuable. So I got a moissanite, they are made in America and tests as a diamond at the jewelers. Price wise they are about $550 a carat. I looked at a ton of rings and different price levels of diamonds and I cannot tell the difference and I compared side by side. I say f**k the cartel and buy american.
"from the with-maps-microscopes-and-strippers dept."
I want to marry whoever wrote this line.