Recently, the World Diamond Council (WDC) highlighted; From the sand and from the sea: The Namibia case study! The Study of A seabed littered with gemstones! Here highlighted part say, CDM’s alluvial diamond deposits in the Sperrgebiet for many years represented the bulk of the country’s output.
In 1960s, however, geologists confirmed that, over millennia, a massive number of rough diamonds, sourced from ancient inland kimberlites, had been washed down by the Orange River into the Atlantic. The seabed east of where the river emptied into the ocean was rich with high-quality gemstones.
To extract these goods, marine diamond mining methods were required. The most notable of them involved the literal vacuuming of diamondiferous sand off the seafloor. It was initially developed by a Texan oilman named Sammy Collins, who obtained the first offshore mining concession, and formed the Marine Diamond Corporation. Between 1961 and 1970, it mined about 1.5 million carats from 20 meters beneath the ocean’s surface.
De Beers set up its own marine mining company in Cape Town, South Africa, and through the venture pioneered deep-sea diamond mining, exploiting deposits as deep as 140 meters under the sea. But in 2000, De Beers agreed with the now independent Namibian government that its local marine operation would be run in-country. The first phase was completed the following year, with the transfer to Namibia of four diamond mining vessels from South Africa.
In 2005, Namibian diamond production from marine resources overtook land production for the first time, making Debmarine Namibia, a Namdeb subsidiary, the largest single diamond producer in the country.
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