Diamond Mining - Pitfalls and Challenges

Have you ever given any thought to how that pretty, shiny diamond you wear was brought up out of the earth? Probably have since you are reading this. Well it might surprise you to know that it is not like coal mining where people wearing hard hats with little lights on top of them go down into the earth with pick-axes and dig for hours until they fight the right stone, then chip away the earth around it until voilla! They have the perfect diamond. Diamond mining today is actually an industry managed mostly by machine in a few select areas around the world where nature has seen fit to bring these sparkling beauties to the surface for us to find.

Kimberlite Pipes

Kimberlite pipes are natural tunnels in the earth that diamonds use to escape the earth’s mantle where they are formed. Diamonds may be the hardest natural substance known to man, but in the face of nature, they can be quite frail, easily destroyed by the various pressures that exist in the crust of the earth between the surface (where we dig for them) and the mantle where they are first formed. Diamonds come to the surface of the earth through eruptions in the kimberlite pipes. You must not think of these eruptions as you do a volcanic eruption, no new eruptions of kimberlite pipes have happened on the earth for a very long time. These eruptions move liquid earth and diamonds from deep inside the earth towards the surface in a very short period of time (as little as a day). It is here that we find the precious stones for mining.

Extracting the Diamonds

The simplest way to describe most diamond mining processes is to say that a huge chunk of earth is pulled from the ground and then sifted through either by machines or people to pull the diamonds out of it. This process isn’t even always done on the surface. In the early 90s it became financially feasible to mine for diamonds under the oceans of the world as well. This is done using a huge drill - 6 to 7 meters in diameter - to drill into the seabed and then suck up tons of earth to the surface for inspection and sorting. Needless to say this is a process that largely leaves man out of the direct equation of digging for diamonds.

Another way in which diamonds are sometimes mined, mostly in Africa, is through a process called artisanal mining. This looks very much like the old gold miners of the 1800s in the United states who would ‘pan’ for gold. Workers known as ‘diamond diggers’ will sift through water and silt and sand to find tiny stones in areas where diamonds may be found. The vast majority of commercial diamonds in the world are no longer found using this method.

Despite the lack of recent eruptions in the earth of kimberlite pipes, there are plenty of diamonds being brought forth out of the ground on a regular basis. Something to the tune of 130 million karats of diamonds are mined every year around the world and there is no immediate sign of slowing.