White Diamond Weighing 8.52 Carats Found at Crater of Diamonds State Park
June 28, 15
(IDEX Online News) – The fifth-largest diamond ever found at Arkansas’s Crater of Diamonds State Park was recovered last week. The 8.52-carat white diamond was found Wednesday by Bobbie Oskarson of Longmont, Colorado, at Arkansas’s Crater of Diamonds State Park.
The diamond is clear white and icicle shaped and has been named the “Esperanza Diamond,” which is both the name of Oskarson’s niece and the Spanish word for “hope.”
The stone is about three-quarters of an inch long, said park interpreter Waymon Cox.
“At first she thought it might be a quartz crystal due to its elongated shape, but park staff later confirmed that she had found a diamond. Cox said, “Ms. Oskarson’s 8.5-carat diamond is absolutely stunning, sparkling with a metallic shine, and appears to be an unbroken, capsule-shaped crystal. It features smooth, curved facets, a characteristic shared by all unbroken diamonds from the Crater of Diamonds.”
The four largest diamonds found by park visitors are the white 16.37-carat Amarillo Starlight found in 1975 by W.W. Johnson of Amarillo, Texas; the white 8.82-carat Star of Shreveport found in 1981 by Carroll Blankenship of Shreveport, Louisiana; the white 8.66-carat Illusion Diamond found in 2011 by Beth Gilbertson of Salida, Colorado and the brown 8.61-carat Lamle Diamond found in 1978 by Betty Lamle of Hitchcock, Oklahoma.
The largest diamond ever discovered in the US was found at Arkansas’s diamond site in 1924 during an early mining operation prior to becoming an Arkansas state park in 1972. The Uncle Sam weighed 40.23 carats.
Oskarson’s find is the 227th diamond certified by park staff this year. Cox noted that more than 30 other diamonds have been found on the surface of the search area so far in 2015, due in part to frequent rains this spring.