Wedding Blog

After Miss Orchid’s great post today about a newly-discovered diamond that weighs in at 603 carats, I just had to do some more research about the world’s other humongous diamonds. I’m sure we’ve all heard of the Hope diamond, and I actually thought it was the world’s biggest. But guess what? It’s not–not by a long shot!

According to this site, the world’s largest diamond is actually the Cullinan I, or “Star of Africa”, with a cut weight of over 530 carats! It was cut from a stone weighing over 3,100 carats, originally.

Here’s the bling:

Pretty, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit underwhelmed. Maybe I was picturing huge diamonds being, well, giant versions of the more normal-sized diamonds we have in our engagement rings.

Something more like this, perhaps:

That’s the Premier Rose, weighing in at a paltry 137 carats. Psh.

Still not big enough? This white dwarf star has a diamond center! (Image is an artist’s rendering, of course.)

According to the article, it is 10 billion trillion trillion carats in size (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) and is about 2,500 miles across–340 miles wider than our moon!

But back here on Earth, where do our everyday diamonds come from? Some of them come from the world’s largest mine, found in Siberia:

It’s so large that the area above it is a no-fly zone because helicopters have become sucked in due to its huge size.

Look at the tiny red arrow on the right side of this picture:

According to the source I got these photos from, that arrow points to a truck that’s *20 feet* tall.

Something else you may not have known is that the vast majority of mined diamonds are unfit for jewelry use–they’re too small, misshapen, too flawed, etc. In fact, Wikipedia says that 80% of all diamonds are put to industrial use: as drill bits for oil rigs, or for grinding and polishing other substances (even other diamonds!)

There’s so much else to the world of diamonds beyond jewelry–they really are a fascinating substance!