Alrosa the Russian diamond miner managed to find three large rough, gem-quality stones ranging from 82 to 163 carats at the Jubilee kimberlite pipe of its Aikhalsky Mining unit in the country’s northeast.
The diamonds recovered by Alrosa are an 82.82-carat and a 108.34-carat transparent yellow-tinted stones, as well as a 163.11-carat rough yellow-hue diamond.
“Simultaneous extraction of three large rough diamonds, two of which are over 100 carats, within such a short period of time is a one-off event especially when it comes to gem-quality diamonds,” the director of the company’s United Selling Organization (USO), Evgeny Agureev, said in the statement.
As a rule, Agureev noted, only 5-10 similar stones over 100 carats may be recovered within a year, and they are always in great demand at auctions.
The 82.82-carat octahedron diamond measures 23.28 x 19.06 x 18.8 x 15.94 mm. It is a transparent yellow-tinted crystal with small inclusions, Alrosa said. The 108.34-carat one measures 23 x 20.56 x 18.07 x 17.86 mm and has a yellow-tinted colour with small inclusions. The 163.11-carat stone, in turn, measures 26.67 x 25.59 x 22.4 mm. It is a transparent yellow-hue crystal with inclusions near the surface, said Alrosa.
“Simultaneous extraction of three large rough diamonds, two of which are over 100 carats, within such a short period of time is a one-off event especially when it comes to gem-quality diamonds. As a rule, only 5-10 similar stones over 100 carats may be recovered within a year, and they are always in great demand at auctions. In the short term, rough diamonds will be delivered to the United Selling Organization (USO) ALROSA, where our experts will give them a detailed assessment,” noted the Director of the USO ALROSA Evgeny Agureev.
Jubilee pipe was discovered in 1975 and ranks among the largest primary diamond deposits both in Yakutia and abroad. It is located in close vicinity to the Aikhal settlement and 485 km north of Mirny. Open-pit mining at Jubilee started in 1989. For 9 months of this year, Jubilee pipe produced 6.57 million carats of rough diamonds that is some 22% of ALROSA’s total diamond output.
Jubilee pipe is traditionally ALROSA’s leader in the recovery of large diamonds. Twenty rough diamonds over 50 carats have been extracted from Jubilee since the beginning of 2017. Unique names are often given to the facts of recovery of such stones. For instance, in the fall this year the fact of recovery of another 51.91-carat rough diamond from Jubilee was named “Russian Ambassador Andrey Karlov”.
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