Diamond (C)

For sale are individual Diamond specimens, as illustrated. Each comes with a 4x magnifying lid box to protect and enhance the specimen.

Diamonds are actually more common than their price would typically suggest. However, supply of the jewelry grade diamonds is very heavily controlled by a cartel of diamond miners who ensure that supply is tight enough to keep prices at silly levels. 

However, tiny, industrial grade diamonds like this are not as tightly controled, hence they are much more affordable to mineral collectors who just want a specimen of what is a major mineral type. 

For those who would like to pay a little more in order to purchase a diamond with a nice colour. Please visit this link:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/-/292287418385

What is a Diamond?

Diamonds are a form of carbon. They differ from graphite, another form of carbon by their extremely strong crystaline structure, formed under intense heat and pressure deep below the Earth's surface. They are the hardest naturally occuring substance known to man. Flawless gem grade specimens of diamonds are considered extremely rare and precious stones, and are worth millions. These are tiny, affordable specimens for mineral collectors. Diamonds are an important mineral type, because it is used as a type specimen in Moh's 1-10 scale of hardness, within which diamond represents 10, the very hardest on this scale. Thus, no mineral collection is complete without at least one example of this mineral type!

What is Moh's scale?

The Moh's scale was invented by the famous German geologist and mineralogist Frederich Mohs (1773-1839) as a frame of reference for measuring the hardness of different naturally occurring minerals.

The minerals concerned are ranked (from softest to hardest) as follows:

1. Talc Mg3Si4O10(OH)2

2. Gypsum (selenite) CaSO4·2H2O

3. Calcite CaCO3

4. Flourite CaF2

5. Apatite Ca5(PO4)3(F,Cl,OH)

6. Feldspar (Orthoclase) KAlSi3O8


7. Quartz SiO2

8. Topaz Al2SiO4(F,OH)2
 
9. Corundum Al2O3

10. Diamond C (pure carbon)

Although this scale is purely ordinal and ranked by class, rather than absolute hardness (for example, diamond is 4 times as hard as corundum, which is itself only twice as hard as topaz) it is still used by geologists today as a general frame of reference and is included in scratch based kits for testing a mineral's hardness in terms of this scale.

See Also:

My other listings for some interesting specimens of various rocks, minerals, and fossils, specialising in amber with insect and other inclusions dating all the way back to the cretaceous dinosaur era!