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The Canadian Arctic and Botswana are a long way from
the diamond jewellers of Fifth Avenue in New York,
Times Square in Hong Kong, Bond Street in London,
and Place Vendôme in Paris. However, it is in places
like these that the world’s most valuable diamonds are
being extracted at immense cost and effort.
Diamonds were formed within the earth’s sub-cratonic
lithospheric mantle by processes more than three
billion years ago. They tend to occur within ancient
and stable parts of the earth’s crust, known as cratons,
where they have been protected from destructive
geological processes and were then transported to
the earth’s surface within kimberlite.
I N FOCUS :
THE M I RACL E
OF PRODUCT I ON
Challenges and innovation in rough
diamond production.