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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."
The areas where diamonds have direct, practical use have been on artificial diamonds for a while (specifically, diamond cutting blades). It's only the jeweler's diamonds that are still natural.
There are also some potential practical uses of diamonds that have no current use because large quantities are too expensive. Such as building materials, thermal conductors, and semiconductors.
Until recently, most artificial diamonds had too many impurities to look good on a ring, even to an untrained eye (you'd have to be blind to not notice that your stone is distinctly yellow). Even now, making pure artificial diamonds is about the same price as digging them out of the ground. Still, the techniques are only going to get better, and I'll be dancing the streets when DeBeers goes bankrupt.
Not a typewriter
That's just because it's relatively cheap to produce. You can make blue, orange or natural clear as well.
For instance D.NEA
http://d.neadiamonds.com/
Growing diamonds of nontrivial size still isn't cheap, unfortunately. Prices are falling, and size and quality are improving; but high temperature vapor deposition still consumes fair chunks of expensive machine time.
People who are buying a couple of carats for thousands of dollars are utter morons; but diamonds as bulk material aren't really here yet.
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.
Diamonds are precious because about 70+ years of marketing by DeBeers has made popular opinion think they are valuable. All those "Diamonds are forever" type of ads you see? Marketing. And not just any diamond, they had to be big, beautiful expensive diamonds, not the cheap ones people used to buy in the early 1900's. And not only that, but marketing to convince people they need to keep buying diamonds.
And yes, we can make them artificially - either vapor deposition, or large pressures and high temperatures, or probably a ton of other methods. Look up for industrial diamonds (they're quite useful in industry).
It's basically all DeBeers marketing - DeBeers basically bought up all the diamond mines and established a complex network of distributors that effectively took over all cosmetic diamond sales. These diamonds were then effectively rationed to make their price go up. When some shrewd business practice causes potential losses in the value of diamonds, DeBeers puts some control that effectively disrupts the practice. (DeBeers has tried hard to quash any sort of thing that might disrupt the price of diamonds and collapse its monopoly). The price of a diamond is artificially inflated, and kept that way. And marketing ensures that you can't get away with some low-quality diamond, you must buy a nice expensive one for your significant other.
In fact, the resale value of diamonds is quite poor, so as investments, you can do better elsewhere.
Here's an interesting read on how DeBeers turned a relatively cheap gem into something desirable, and managed to keep tight control over production in order to keep value up.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/198202/diamond
If I had mod points...
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
I'll answer that one - it's because the Cartel that sells them decides on the price. That way it is maintained artificially high. If diamonds were sold for their rarity value they'd be much, much cheaper.
Here's more on the subject (pdf link)
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Wow. I'd be wonderfully happy to receive a diamond that cost $5.00 if my husband thought the jewelry was pretty enough to buy for me. What do I care about the cost of the diamond?
He knows I like shiny things and that I prefer fake over real, because I can get far more fake ones than real ones and I worry far less over wearing the fake ones. Most of my 'good' jewelry is kept in the safe anyway.
I agree with the other posters. If your wife takes issue with the cost of the present then you have far worse problems. Such as a wife that needs an attitude adjustment.
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's 'rogue' because he went off on his own for 10 years after the diamond prospector he used to work for gave up, and without the help of any of the big-name diamond prospectors at the time.
don't be such pussies, i mean i know it's slashdot, but got-dam.
It's "Mohs scale", not "Moh's scale". Mohs was the name of the German bloke the thing's named after.
So much for being a "geologist geek" (and shouldn't that be "geology geek", anyway?).
I think the defn of rogue they're using is: no longer obedient, belonging, or accepted and hence not controllable or answerable; deviating, renegade. Not the best word choice, but if you accept this defn and strip any negative value judgments from it, it is technically not far off.
More to the point, though, who cares what other people say? Read his words, form your own judgments. If you do your part as the reader, then it doesn't make any difference what others want you to think...you've figured that out for yourself.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
Actually, Canadian diamonds sell for a premium, at least at jewellery stores, especially the government certified "Polar Ice" diamonds which are not only mined in the Northwest Territories but also cut and polished there.
Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
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]
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.
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.