A t 7am on the morning of August 19, four mine employees and their security escorts entered the sorting room at the Karowe Diamond Mine in Botswana. They were not expecting anything unusual, but in one of the bins used to catch the diamond material from the automated sorting machine lay a 2,492-carat rough. It is the second-largest diamond recovered in history.
To put it into context, the largest, at 3,106 carats, is the Cullinan, found in 1905 and now a multiple constituent of the British Crown Jewels. It yielded nine major stones in total: the largest Cullinan I, at 530.20 carats, is set in the Royal Sceptre.
“So many people have asked me who dug it up,” says William Lamb, the president and chief executive of Lucara, which owns 100 per cent of the Karowe mine, “but the facility we have in Botswana is on an industrial scale and everyone on site played a role in recovering the stone.”.
