5 minute read
Treasures of the Earth
ضر ا قﺎﻤﻋأ ﻦﻣ ٌ زﻮﻨﻛ
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؟ةعزنلا هذه ىلإ تاعاسلاو تارهوجملل
1. Pieces from the Boucheron Serpent Bohème Aquaprase collection. 2. ROUGE INCANDESCENT transformable bracelet, in white gold, pink gold, rubies and diamonds. Detachable camellia motif that may be worn as a brooch, and reveals another openwork camellia motif. CHANEL Fine Jewellery. 2
.يداملا هلكش يف تخيلا
.راتافلا تاضراع ىلع مهتاعومجم
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Treasures of the Earth
New discoveries increase the wonder of nature’s precious gifts
In 2013, gem explorer Yianni Melas discovered an unusual looking stone. Some thought his discovery was chrysoprase, while others deemed it to be opal. After submitting his fnd to the Gemological Institute of America, it was declared to be a previously unknown type of chalcedony. Melas named his discovery Aquaprase, in tribute to its sea-like blue-green colour. The special characteristics of Aquaprase, with an iridescence and variation of colour that displays differently according to the climate around it, made it instantly desirable as a new gemstone. To date, the location of Aquaprase’s discovery remains a well-guarded secret.
While many of the most famous gemstones, such as diamond, ruby, sapphire and emerald, have a long-established history of discovery and admiration, others just like Aquaprase have lain hidden until more recent times. Painite, for example, was only discovered in 1951 in Burma by British gemologist Arthur Charles Davy Pain, after whom it is named. Today, this gemstone remains relatively unknown based on its extreme rarity. Likewise, Grandidierite, a blue-green mineral frst discovered in in Madagascar by French mineralogist Alfred Lacroix in 1902 and named after French explorer Alfred Grandidier, remains extremely rare in terms of gem-quality discoveries. A more well-known yet fairly recent discovery is Tanzanite. It is thought that Masai herders in the foothills of Kilimanjaro in northern Tanzania frst spied the beautiful blue crystals in the earth in the late 1960s. Local fortune hunter Manuel d'Souza became aware of the discovery and, imagining it could be sapphire, he quickly registered four mining claims. His bounty turned out to be what the world now knows as Tanzanite, a gemstone prized for its vivid colour and high clarity, and which is a thousand times rarer than diamond. Lured by the desirability of Tanzanite, many miners risk their lives to extract it from the rock face. The rewards can prove to be incredible, such as in 2020, when the two largest Tanzanite gemstones ever recorded, weighing 9.27kg and 5.103kg, were discovered by a small-scale Tanzanian mining frm. These were subsequently acquired by the government for $3.35m with the aim of placing them in the national museum in Dar es Salaam.
Other incredible discoveries of recent times include the world's largest single natural blue sapphire, weighing 310kg, known as the Queen of Asia, found in Sri Lanka – a country famed for the quality of its sapphires - in 2021. In the same year, the third largest diamond of its kind in the world – a 1,098 carat stone – was unearthed in Botswana, the country where the second largest diamond, the 1,109-carat Lesedi La Rona, was discovered in 2015. Both are only outshone by the 3,106-carat Cullinan found in South Africa in 1905.
The beauty of gemstones is not only in what they can convey to us as objects of adornment but also what secrets they can reveal of the Earth’s past. In October last year, scientists researching in Greenland, which is home to the oldest known deposits of rubies in the world, identifed evidence of graphite in ruby that they believe to be the remains of evidence of early life on the planet, a microorganism that existed more than 2.5 billion years ago.
With gemstones often buried deep beneath the planet’s surface and often formed over billions of years, time will only tell what incredible stories still remain to be unearthed.
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1. LION SECRET ring in white gold, platinum, diamonds and blue sapphire. 1 cushion-cut blue sapphire 30.92 cts.,
CHANEL High Jewellery. 2. Boucheron Fenêtre sur
Ciel necklace set with a 35ct cabochon tanzanite and mother-of-pearl, paved with diamonds, in titanium.
