A Canadian mining company has found what's thought to be the second-largest diamond ever in Botswana, measuring a whopping 1,111 carats. It's almost the size of a tennis ball.
Lucara said in a release late Wednesday that it found the record-setting stone on the south lobe of the company's Karowe Mine in Botswana.
It's described as "gem quality, Type IIa," and its dimensions are 65 mm by 56 mm by 40 millimetres. One carat is equal to a fifth of a gram, so Lucara's 1,111-carat diamond weighs 222 grams.
That's the biggest gem-quality diamond discovered since the famed Cullinan diamond measuring more than 3,000 carats was found in South Africa in 1905. That diamond was subsequently cut into smaller pieces, the two largest portions of which were incorporated into Britain's Crown Jewels.
"The significance of the recovery of a gem-quality stone larger than 1,000 carats, the largest for more than a century ... cannot be overstated," Lucara CEO William Lamb said.
There's every indication the company has tapped into the motherlode of large diamonds in its mine. On Thursday, Lucara announced it had found two more large diamonds — one measuring 813 carats and another measuring 374 — in the same vein.
Diamonds measuring more than 100 carats are extremely rare.
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