Woman Finds Yellow Diamond While Watching YouTube Video on How to Find Diamonds | Hacker News Reader

Woman Finds Yellow Diamond While Watching YouTube Video on How to Find Diamonds

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95 pointsprostoalex49 comments

If anyone is in or around Arkansas it is a fun place to visit especially with kids. For a small price of admission you get to go onto the property and dig around in the dirt as much as you want. There are people in the area that do it as a hobby bringing shovels and 5-gallon buckets to see what they can find. A park ranger told us the same thing from the article that the best time to find diamonds is right after a large rainfall when the ground shifts and diamonds can be seen on the surface in the sunlight.

the same can be said about those who want to find seashells, the beaches after very large storms are fascinating and rewarding.

with regards to ruby, diamond, and other precious gem, mining the part I find enjoyable is most of these places are off the beaten path and a day spent in the country playing in the mud can be rewarding for lack of distractions of everyday life

Especially in Arkansas. It's a really beautiful state. There is a bunch of other natural beauty to see like hot springs and cave tours. Our family has vacation in Arkansas quite a bit.

Blanchard Springs Caverns in Arkansas are truly a site to behold. Pictures cannot do it justice. And I have been to many well known caverns throughout the world to compare.

As far as a cave that you can simply take an elevator down to and walk through on paved sidewalks, it is one of the best in the world. (There are also other portions for the more adventurous. Some that are completely underwater and require scuba gear.)

I look for fossils after heavy rains and flooding.

Another thing fun for kids is panning for gold out west. The sunlight glitters on the gold flakes and catches your eye.

I think there are even places you can buy a bag of dirt to be shipped to you.

Another interesting thing you can do is buy unsorted/unwashed roman coins from europe. There are techniques to soak and reveal the face of the coins. Where else can you uncover 2000 year old human artifacts?

Our family did that in Alaska. It was campy and part of a tour but it was fun. The kids still remember it.

I live a short distance from Crater of Diamonds State Park.

It's just a big field, plowed occasionally to turn up fresh dirt. Visitors look through the plowed dirt, looking for diamonds.

It's a unique place. Kind of fun, for the first half hour or so. (Then a little tedious.)

We went recently and had a good time. It was very hot and we took a few breaks, we didn't find any diamonds. The kids had a great time, the facilities are quite nice, and we got to see more of Arkansas which is quickly becoming a favorite state.

I went on a school field trip as a kid, def something fun to do once for like half an hour to an hour. Though might be interesting to go back as an adult, though I'm only back in that part of the country for the holidays now which leaves me with little time to drive all the way there.

I'm in Harrison, and have been meaning to get down there.

Is there a way to know ahead of time when they plow the field?

Also, I seem to recall that at least at one time there was a private individual who offered something similar to the park itself. Is that option still around?

I don't know about either of those.

But here's a tip-- they say if you go looking right after a rain, the dust is wetted down and the diamonds are easier to find. So they say, I can't say for myself.

DeBeers and all that, can she actually get money for this thing?

I bet someone would buy it. I wonder if it helps that its origin is well known.

That's pretty cool. Nothing cooler than finding a shiny rock.

Do diamonds react to any type of fields or anything? Is there a way to invent a diamond detector much like a metal detector?

Hit it with a clean 785nm laser and the rovibrational modes of the crystal lattice downconvert (and upconvert aka anti-stokes but I digress...) about 1/10^6 photons to: http://www.bayspec.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/ramspec-78...

Unfortunatly, that's a bit tricky if it's underground. Fun to bring to a gem show though.

Diamonds are just compacted carbon. If you could create a device that detected dense carbon objects, then it could find diamonds.

And since carbon is the 4th most frequent atom in the universe, you would also find a whole bunch of not-so-interesting things.

This hypothetical device would also find every living organism around it as well so it would be kinda useless.

I'm not a scientist but surely theres a threshold density for diamonds that is far above rocks/living objects?

Density of rocks seems to top out around 3.2 g/cm³[0], but if you could find a way of scanning for material that was 99%+ Carbon and which had the density of diamond (3.51 g/cm³) and you could detect very small buried items, then that might be a start.

https://chem.libretexts.org/Ancillary_Materials/Exemplars_an...

> surely theres a threshold density for diamonds that is far above rocks

Nope, diamond is 3.51g/cm³, some rocks are in the same density range.

Diamond's density is 3.5 g/cm3, nothing special.

How much is something like that worth?

I didn't see it on the first run through, so had to go back. From the article:

> There are a ton of factors that go into appraising a diamond like the one that Hollingshead discovered, but it’s likely worth somewhere in the tens of thousands of dollars.

I think it depends on color and clarity but I imagine a pretty good amount.

This is mentioned in the article

Click bait title, should be just "Woman Finds a Yellow Diamond at a State Park after the Recent Rainfall".

There is literally nothing interesting to talk about in this article.

This is the only diamond-bearing site accessible to the general public, so this is at least a moderately interesting subject.

There are plenty of diamond-bearing sites in California which are publicly accessible. You just need to know how to find kimberlite pipes on BLM lands.

I like the title. It's a quick way to convey her approximate experience level.

A man learns coding by watching youtube videos !!

Caro avenger is an interesting name for a diamond :)

Yellow diamonds? Sorry but unless the diamond is clear its considered inpure and into the bin it goes.

Then marketing got involved. Now yellow diamonds are a thing. Dont fall for it.

Diamonds? Sorry but that's a form of carbon way too hard to eat and into the bin it goes.

Then marketing got involved. Now diamonds are a thing. Don't fall for it.

Not even remotely in the same ballpark.

In the modern era, diamonds are not all that rare or hard to retrieve to begin with, and now we have mass-produced synthetic diamonds that are actually higher-quality (fewer flaws) than mined ones. The idea that a tiny pebble, however artfully cut, is rare and precious and worth thousands of dollars is 100% marketing.

When I was looking at diamond rings the synthetics available to me were at a high cost, not much less than a "traditional" diamond. Same goes for alternate stones such as Moissanite which HackerNews has discussed below. So, not being pro-diamond here, but simply stating it looks like marketing has brought up the prices of these alternate methods too.

Diamonds Suck/pro Moissanite website: http://diamondssuck.com/ (2006)

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17186457

Perhaps you were shopping with an unscrupulous jeweler then, because, all else the same, a Moissanite stone is significantly less expensive than a comparable diamond

There is no law stopping anyone from mining for diamonds, and they do fetch a good price even on the secondary market.

I'd say the fact there there is not a glut of diamonds shows that they are actually pretty rare.

It is rarer than many minerals, yes, but not enough to justify the astronomical prices. The global diamond supply chain is controlled by a handful of powerful companies that cooperate to maintain scarcity and keep prices high.

The idea that engagement rings "must" have a diamond only dates back to the '40s and is entirely down to De Beers' marketing. The same company spent a fortune promoting the idea that synthetic diamonds are somehow inferior and developing tests to distinguish them, even though they're chemically identical and the only way to tell them apart is that natural diamonds are lower-quality, with more flaws and less clarity.

It's all marketing isn't it? Or is there some intrinsic reason why the spectral response of the impurities in a carbon lattice actually matters?

Yes. While diamonds have always been valuable, in the 19th century, DeBeers bought most/all known large mines and exercised their monopoly position to control the market. They also launched massive marketing campaigns touting diamonds as the "best" stone for an engagement ring.

>Or is there some intrinsic reason why the spectral response of the impurities in a carbon lattice actually matters?

It makes a pretty color?

but if people perceive yellow diamonds to be pretty (even if its through marketing), then it is all the same

Jewelry companies are masters of marketing. All they do to sell colored diamonds is to give them enticing names. Such as Canary diamonds.

Also, some of the most famous diamonds ever were yellow, including the Oppenheimer diamond.

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