One of the world’s largest rough diamond was found in January 2018.

In the mountains of southern Africa, miners have uncovered one of the largest gem grade diamonds ever found.  This massive discovery of the world’s fifth largest diamond was announced Monday earlier this week. Weighing in at an astounding 910-carats, or 6.4 ounces. The gorgeous gem is slightly heavier than a regulation baseball and roughly the size of two golf balls.

The 910 carat glistening goliath was found in the Letseng Mine in Lesotho. It is the single largest diamond ever recovered from this mine, and the fifth largest in the world.

The mine is majority owned by the London based company, Gem Diamonds Ltd. and the government of Lesotho. It is located in the small landlocked kingdom of Lesotho in southern Africa and sits at an elevation of 10,000 feet making it the highest diamond mine in the world. The mine is famous for producing very large and incredibly high quality diamonds and also earns the highest average selling price for diamonds than anywhere else in the world.

Gem Diamonds Ltd. says the discovered diamond is of extremely high quality and is estimating that the type IIa diamond (which is the most valued and purest of all the diamond types) is D in color, meaning that it is completely colorless without any hint of the yellow tint that often comes when nitrogen atoms are present while the crystal is forming.

      

The pricing of diamonds is gathered from a variety of different factors and will depend on any large inclusions that limit the size of the cut and polished stones it can be divided into. This diamond was eventually sold in Antwerp, Belgium on Monday, March 12th for an impressive $40 million. Nicknamed the “The Lesotho Legend”, its price tag was valued at $43,956 per carat.

This massive find is great news for Gem Diamonds, and comes on the coattails of the news from last week that the Mine had unearthed a 117 carat and 110 carat stones also of the same striking quality. In fact Gem found at least seven stones larger than 100-carats in 2017 alone.