Woman Unearths 8.52-Carat Diamond at Arkansas Park

One of the nation’s most unusual tourist attractions is Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas, which bills itself as the only diamond-producing site in the world where ordinary folks actually can dig for diamonds themselves — and keep whatever they find. Park visitors get to peruse a 37.5-acre field that’s actually the eroded surface of an ancient, gem-bearing volcanic crater. Park officials make the search even easier by occasionally plowing the field to help bring the diamonds to the surface. For $6 plus a $30 deposit, they’ll even rent you a wooden screen and bucket so that you can sift though the soil.

We’re guessing that the park will be getting an increased number of visitors, after a Colorado woman named Bobbie Oskarson found an 8.52-carat white diamond there.

According to a State Parks of Arkansas press release, Oskarson was poking around the southwest corner of the diamond field, an area known as the “Pig Pen” because it’s so muddy. She was 20 minutes into her search when she found the diamond in some scoops of dirt that she dug out from a small mound. At first, she thought it might just be a quartz crystal because of its elongated shape, but the park staff eventually confirmed for her that she’d discovered a genuine treasure.

The diamond is about three-quarters of an inch long and about the circumference of a No. 2 pencil. A park staffer described it as “absolutely stunning, sparkling with a metallic shine, and appears to be an unbroken, capsule-shaped crystal. It features smooth, curved facets, a characteristic shared by all unbroken diamonds from the Crater of Diamonds.”

Oskarso named her gem the Esperanza Diamond, which is both her niece’s name and the Spanish word for “hope.” She has indicated that she’ll keep the gem, instead of selling it. Though sizable, it’s only the fifth biggest diamond ever found at the park. The biggest was the white 16.37-carat Amarillo Starlight found in 1975 by W.W. Johnson of Amarillo, Texas. While there isn’t a reliable estimate of the Esperanza’s value, CNN reported that another large diamond found at the park sold for $150,000 in 1971 and would be worth about $800,000 today.

More than 200 other certified diamonds have been found at the park already in 2015. Here’s a basic primer on how to hunt for them.

From Discovery News