Sept. 25 (UPI) — An Oklahoma family celebrating a birthday at Arkansas’ Crater of Diamonds State Park discovered a brown diamond weighing in at 2.79 carats.
Raynae Madison said she and her family traveled to the park from Cookson, Okla., for her nephew’s birthday and brought along a beach digging kit and sand sifting tools they bought from a dollar store.
The family went sifting near Prospector Trailhead, on the north side of the park, and after going through a few buckets worth of sand, spotted a shiny, oblong object.
“At first I thought it looked really neat, but I wasn’t sure what it was,” Madison said in an Arkansas State Parks news release. “I honestly thought it was too big to be a diamond.”
They took the stone to the park’s Diamond Discovery Center, where experts confirmed it was a 2.79-carat brown diamond.
Raynae Madison and her family traveled from their Oklahoma home to Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas, where they discovered a 2.79-carat brown diamond. Photo courtesy of Arkansas State Parks
“Brown diamonds from the Crater occur due to a process called plastic deformation, which creates structural defects during a diamond’s formation or movement in magma,” Emma O’Neal, an interpreter at the park, said in the news release. “These defects reflect red and green light, combining to make the diamond appear brown.”
Madison dubbed her gem the William Diamond, in honor of her birthday-celebrating nephew.
Raynae Madison and her family traveled from their Oklahoma home to Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas, where they discovered a 2.79-carat brown diamond. Photo courtesy of Arkansas State Parks
The park said the William Diamond is the third-largest gem found at the park so far this year.