Rare Blue Diamonds May Be Earth’s Deepest Secret

Rare Blue Diamonds May Be Earth’s Deepest Secret
A Christie's employee poses with the 14.62 carats Oppenheimer Blue diamond during a preview in Geneva, Switzerland May 12, 2016. (Reuters/Denis Balibouse/File Photo)
Reuters
8/1/2018
Updated:
8/2/2018

WASHINGTON—The Hope Diamond, a rare blue diamond that is one of the world’s most famous jewels, has had a complicated history, passing through the hands of monarchs and bankers and heiresses and thieves before landing for all to see at a Washington museum.

The geological history of blue diamonds is even more complex, according to research published on August 1 examining these exceptionally scarce and valuable gems.

The 45.42 carat Hope Diamond is pictured on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, January 29, 2010. (Reuters/Jason Reed)
The 45.42 carat Hope Diamond is pictured on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, January 29, 2010. (Reuters/Jason Reed)

Blue diamonds comprise only about 0.02 percent of mined diamonds but include some of the world’s most famous jewels.

Diamonds are a crystalline form of pure carbon, forming under enormous heat and pressure. Blue diamonds crystallize alongside water-bearing minerals that long ago were part of the seafloor but were shoved to great depths during the inexorable movement of the immense tectonic plates that shape Earth’s surface, the researchers said.

Scientists already knew these diamonds acquired their blue hue from the element boron. This study indicated this boron once had been in ocean water and was incorporated into the seafloor rock that over millions of years moved deep underground.

“This is the first time anyone has come up with a fact-based story or model for how blue diamonds form. Prior to this study we had no idea where they form, what kinds of host-rocks they form in, or where they might be getting their boron from,” said Gemological Institute of America research scientist Evan Smith, who led the study published in the journal Nature.

Most diamonds are not completely colorless, often possessing slight yellowish tints. Although rare, some even have prominent hues of, for example, yellow, brown, pink or green. About 99 percent of all diamonds form roughly 90 to 125 miles underground—shallower depths than the blue ones.

Aside from the Hope Diamond, on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, another blue diamond called the Oppenheimer Blue in 2016 sold for $57.5 million, at the time the highest auction price for any jewel.

“These diamonds are among the deepest ever found,” Carnegie Institution for Science geochemist Steven Shirey said of the blue diamonds.

By Will Dunham