Your search for a diamond or a piece of diamond jewellery can end at a retail jewellery store, but have you ever wondered how that beautiful sparkly diamond ended there? The beautiful shining diamonds that you see are actually mined from within the earth! Can you imagine such an attractive gleaming diamond being mined from deep within the earth full of dirt and grime!? But, it’s true. Let’s show you how diamonds are mined from the earth and brought to your most loved stores.
Diamond is actually carbon – a crystallized carbon. About one hundred miles under the ground, the excessive heat and pressure from the earth crystallizes carbon into rough diamonds. Then, a specific type of volcanic eruption brings a diamond-containing igneous rock closer to the earth’s surface. Diamonds are mined from such an igneous rock. There are three different types of mining processes that can be done to bring out the diamond.
Alluvial diamond mining
This kind of mining occurs in riverbeds and beaches, where thousands of years of erosion and natural forces like rain, wind, and water currents wash diamonds from their primary deposits to beaches and riverbeds. Miners build walls or divert rivers to expose the diamond-bearing river beds. The sand from such locations is picked and transported to a screening facility for processing.
Pipe mining
Alluvial mining involves waiting for diamonds to rise up to the earth’s surface and be washed away by erosion to settle on the river beds. But, to cut off all that waiting time, miners began to strike closer to where these diamonds can be directly found. This process is known as pipe mining, which could be of two types – open pit and underground pipe mining. The open pit mining process involves removal of the sand and rock just above the igneous rocks. And, underground mining involves the creation of two parallel and vertically connected tunnels, wherein the top tunnel is blasted in a way such that the ores of igneous rocks fall and get collected in the tunnel at the bottom.
Marine diamond mining
This process involves extracting diamonds from the floor of the ocean. Earlier, a swimmer would dive into the ocean to collect gravel from a shallow seabed. But today, with the rising technology, greater depths of seabeds can be accessed through horizontal and vertical marine mining to collect gravel. Horizontal marine diamond mining uses a crawler to such gravel from the floor of the ocean to the surface through flexible pipes. And, vertical marine diamond mining uses large ship-mounted drills to pull up the diamond-bearing gravel. So, you can see how difficult and effortful it is to mine a diamond! And, this is not it. The diamonds achieved from mining are all raw and crude. The diamonds are then taken through various processes to bring in front of you the sleek polished gleaming diamonds that you see at a jewellery store. With all this effort and practice, you can now understand why a diamond is so expensive. But, you definitely don’t want to pay a hefty price for a diamond that isn’t actually genuine. When you are paying for a diamond, you want one that is actually genuine. So, in order to be sure, you can walk into Aura Jewels, one of the best diamond jewellery shops in Bangalore, where you can stay guaranteed that you are getting a diamond that is genuine, and not fake
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