« Who Keeps the Diamond Engagement Ring if You Break Up? | Main | Excel Diamonds Loose Diamond Video Tutorial »
"Eye" In The Sky Will Find Your Diamond.
For us in the Diamond Trade, one of the highest compliments you can give a colleague is to tell him, "You have a Good Eye" when to it comes to correctly evaluating diamond rough for manufacturing or for assessing and evaluating prices on polished goods.
Now this "Good Eye" has taken a technological leap and is sure to revolutionize the Diamond Mining Industry with the announcement by the Canadian company, Gedex Inc. of their new proprietary technology that will pinpoint diamond deposits and make Canada the largest diamond producer in years to come.
The Globe and Mail reports today that Mississauga-based Gedex Inc. has developed an airborne surveying system capable of "seeing" as far as 12 kilometres beneath the Earth's surface to identify precious metals, oil, gas and minerals that are invisible to current systems.
Gedex's system, a new twist on a century-old idea, has already won the company a mining research award, the first ever given by the Mining Journal, the authoritative 170-year-old British publication. The award was adjudicated by an international panel of experts, who cited Gedex for "primary research that is expected to have the most significance for mining and mining equipment in the future."
Gedex's new system, known as a High Density Airborne Gravity Gradiometer (HD-AGG), uses tiny variations in gravity to identify geological structures beneath the ground. Among the structures it can precisely spot are kimberlite pipes -- vertical columns of rock pushed upward into the Earth's crust by volcanic action far below -- that often contain diamonds.
The Gedex system has its roots in the 19th century, when a Hungarian physicist named Roland, Baron von Eotvos, discovered that variations in gravitational force could help in geophysical exploration, a concept known as gravitational gradiometry. The U.S. military used his ideas to build navigation and missile-targeting systems for submarines during the Cold War.
Gedex also developed a way to use superconducting quantum interference devices, or SQUIDs, to measure tiny variations in gravity. These electronic devices work only at extremely low temperatures, so Gedex encased its instrument in a cryostat, a kind of high-tech cousin of the Thermos bottle that keeps it at roughly absolute zero.
In use in the field, an airplane carrying the HD-AGG flies over the area to be explored. A single pass can cover a strip 60 to 100 metres wide for preliminary exploration; for more detailed mapping the plane flies lower, covering less terrain on each pass.
The device measures minute gravity variations that translate into a colour-coded map of what lies beneath the ground.
DeBeers is hot to get their hands on this technology and is already in talks with Gedex.
This technology will revolutionize diamond mining and exploration.
The full story is here: Diamond Eye In The Sky
Here's looking at you, Kid!!
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://blogadmin.mysecureweb.net/mt-track-back.cgi/6613
