Chortle! The images of those agates always have the colour saturation turned-up to 11, but yeah lots are heat-treated or dyed too. That one looks less unconvincing than many to be fair.
As a fellow of the gemmological society in a previous life, I used to have to check stuff like this by people who thought it was worth a fortune.
Yes that crystal shop that also sells incense and bongs would definitely not try to sell something treated. Let alone all those rock crystal shards cut in to some shape that could never belong to a trigonal crystal system.
That and the fact that everything had become treated with more and more horrific chemicals and skulduggery. Meaning everything just got Raman probed and the fact that every diamond is boring as fuck after you have seen a few thousand.
In both museums I often ended-up with jobs no-one else wanted and/or knew what to do with (run-of-the-mill academics tend to be bright but not exactly mentally flexible…). The zaniest ever came from DeBeers. You probably know this, but diamonds are common as muck provided you don’t mind sending men to die at the bottom of giant, half-mile deep holes in the middle of nowhere. Most natural diamonds are small and flawed, and since the advent of nice, cheap, regularly sized, stronger, purer synthetics, third-rate natural stones are not much wanted for anything industrial. Leaving DeBeers with a problem - literally tons of worthless diamonds they don’t want, which if they were sold, would drag down the value of the more commercial stuff, and costing them a fortune to store securely.
So they farmed-out a request for proposals and feasibility-studies for secure, permanent disposal of diamonds in large quantities to a wide range of different institutions, presumably hoping for a creative and reliable method that didn’t cost an insane amount. The remit was pretty vague: inert, robust, high value materials need safe, permanent and irretrievable disposal. They probably just wanted a nice accessible deep shaft mine somewhere they could bury 'em in (or someone like @Valvebloke to zap them with lasers) - but fuck that, so I went nuts and came-up with an outline scheme to encase them in concrete tetrapods/dolos and dump them out of the bottom of a bulk aggregate carrier straight into a deep ocean trench at a point of maximum depth and subduction (probably the Tongan trench for its remoteness and high subduction rate) - meaning they would literally be dragged back into the Earth’s outer core over a few millenia…
To this day I don’t know what they went with (which is hardly surprising), but I’m damn sure it wasn’t mine. Fun though, and the Museum got paid for the consultancy work anyway…
That’s really cool.
Ahhhh De Beers controlling the release of diamonds since the days of Rhodes killing tens of thousands of people a year to mine them. He was a genius for it, making people bid on the barrels and only select people could, who would then sort the rough to sell graded only to select friends/people etc etc. Sewn up from top to bottom of the supply chain.
Didn’t realise they were still it at after making it the engagement gift and a months salary and all those of advertising ideas they came up with.
My favourite stones for testing were emeralds especially when a location report was needed for value reasons. Looking at three phase or two phase inclusions in negative crystals and changing the temperature to see if they sublimate. All because Columbian ftw
Why not just burn them ?
C + O2 —> CO2
Maybe I should be careful what I say though. I was based for most of my working life in the orange circle here
The red circle contains these people
They make synthetic diamonds. Ooooh ! Look who owns them !
The green circle is where the UK’s new national vaccine manufacturing centre will be. I think it’s got more of a building in it now.
VB
For all I know that’s what they did!
LOL.
Where’s that then? Hobbiton?
No, Interneton…
Walking in the forest yesterday, came across this. Not a particularly popular path - someone just did it for the pleasure of it.
My Dad used to sit on the beach on holiday having found a big lump of chalk and would make a chain from it with a small penknife. Would take hours.
Where?
This one is about 6ft tall and called Zavion. It seems that the artist moves it around. He is based on Orcas Island, just on the US side of the US/Canada border in Washington state. His website is
https://www.howeart.net/
That’s fabulous.
Some great you tubes on him