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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.
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
"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."
Why does a simple tag get you so riled up?
Seriously. Just ignore it.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
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.
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!
On Rhodium, it went from over $10000/oz to under $1000 in the past 6 months...
Years ago aluminum was more expensive than gold. The refining process was so difficult that, though aluminum was one of the most common metals, the yield was in grams. Then someone invented a new extraction process. Aluminum suddenly became cheap.
Carbon is not so rare. It may not happen soon, but there may be a time when common items such as ICs or even cell phones cases are made from diamonds. Instead of measuring by carat, they'll measure it by ounces or inches.
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]
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.
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
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.