2023-09-10 06:06:46
The girl found this diamond. Courtesy of Arkansas State Parks
A 7-year-old visited a park in Arkansas, USA to celebrate her birthday.
Taking a break from the heat, the girl stumbled upon a 2.95-carat diamond.
The child gets to keep the diamond because the park has the rule “Whoever finds it gets to keep it”.
This is a machine translation of an article from our US colleagues at Insider. It was automatically translated and checked by a real editor. We welcome feedback at the end of the article.
Aspen Brown received a surprise gift when she visited a public park in Arkansas, USA, on September 1 for her 7th birthday.
Taking a break from the heat, Brown stumbled upon a 2.95-carat brown diamond the size of a green pea, like Arkansas State Parks announced.
“She got hot and wanted to sit down for a moment, so she went to the big rocks on the fence,” her father, Luther Brown, told the park authority, and next thing she knew she came running over to me and said, ‘Dad! Dad! I found one!’”
Finding a gem of this size in the 37.5-acre diamond prospecting area is an “extraordinarily rare” find, Aaron Palke, a researcher at the Gemological Institute of America (GIA), told Business Insider.
On average, visitors find one to two diamonds here per day
Palke and his research team visited the park last year. They searched for two and a half days and found no diamonds when they got there, Palke said.
According to the state park service, visitors find one to two diamonds per day on average. But the size of the gemstones is usually small.
“Most of the ones you find are smaller than a grain of rice,” Palke said of the diamonds.
Technically, a diamond found in the park is typically between 0.05 and 0.20 carats, Palke said. A carat is one fifth of a gram.
“It’s very unusual to find a diamond like this in Arkansas,” Palke said of Brown’s discovery.
Brown’s family could not be reached for comment.
In total, over 75,000 diamonds were unearthed from the crater
The Arkansas site is unique because it is the only place in the world where the public can dig for and keep diamonds, Palke said.
Stephen Morisseau, the GIA’s communications director, told Business Insider that the diamonds in the park most likely formed deep in the Earth billions of years ago, but only about 95 million years ago – or “relatively recently,” as Palke put it came to the surface in a volcanic eruption.
“In total, over 75,000 diamonds have been excavated from the crater since the first diamonds were discovered in 1906 by John Huddleston, a farmer who owned the land long before it became an Arkansas State Park in 1972,” the state park said.
About half of these diamonds were found by visitors after the park opened in the 1970s.
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The largest diamond ever unearthed from the site weighed 40.23 carats, or eight grams. The diamond, named Uncle Sam, was found during a mining operation in 1924, according to the state park.
In 2020, a 33-year-old man found one 9.07 carat diamond the size of a marble”. A woman found one the following year 4 carat yellow diamond.
It’s unclear how much Brown’s 2.95-carat diamond would cost, especially because Arkansas diamonds are so rare, Palke said, adding that they are not valued in the same way as commercial diamonds.
“They’re basically collector’s items,” he said.
Under the state park’s “Find it, keep it” policy, Brown was able to take her diamond home with her.
The family plans to name the gem Aspen Diamond.
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