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Industry: Email Alert RSS FeedGems of war: scientists struggle to identify conflict diamonds
Science News, August 10, 2002 by John Pickrell
Diamonds are offered across the globe as tokens of love and devotion. However, behind the beauty of some of these intricately hewn carbon crystals lies a dark story. Though most diamonds come from legitimate sources and travel respectable routes to market, a small portion funds wars, genocide, and possibly international terrorism. Several of Africa's most lethal civil wars are partially financed through the diamond trade.
The diamonds that buy the arms and supplies in such conflicts are almost entirely from Liberia, Sierra Leone, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Angola. All are nations blessed with vast mineral wealth but suffering from ongoing attempts to overthrow their internationally recognized governments. The United Nations has a name for such gems: conflict diamonds.
Rough diamonds are usually smuggled from these areas to more peaceful, neighboring states and there enter the international market. The profits go back to the often terrorism-bent rebels. A Dec. 30, 2001, article in the Washington Post linked some trade in conflict diamonds in Congo to the terrorist groups Al Qaeda and Hezbollah.
The problem of conflict diamonds is huge. According to Global Witness, a London-based advocacy organization, an Angolan rebel army known as Unita generated $3.7 billion over 6 years in the 1990s largely through trading these gems. Global Witness estimates that total world-diamond production in 1999 was worth $6.8 billion.
Conflict diamonds make up about 2.5 percent of annual worldwide production, says Jeffrey Harris, an earth scientist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland and a scientific consultant to the giant South African diamond conglomerate De Beers. Other scientists give estimates of up to 4 percent.
U.N. sanctions and humanitarian organizations' efforts to keep conflict diamonds off the market haven't been effective. The gems smuggled out of suspect areas are usually indistinguishable from legitimate diamonds. Variations that are easily visible can turn up within a single mine. Only in rare cases do unusual characteristics, such as a particular yellow tint, characterize a site. Compared with other types of gems, high-quality diamonds are remarkably similar between sites, a problem that's exacerbated when stones are polished.
Could science hold the key to stamping out this deadly trade? Some geoscientists argue that chemistry and physics can identify conflict diamonds. Like a fingerprint, unique characteristics such as composition or microscopic structural imperfections could indicate where a diamond originates, they say. Diamonds entering the market could be tested to determine their origin, and gems found to come from conflict zones under U.N. sanctions could be confiscated.
Work to forensically identify diamonds has grown out of research into diamond formation and other geological processes within Earth.
Geologists and mineralogists have always had an interest in how diamonds form, says Steven E. Haggerty of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He points out that much of what we know about conditions in Earth's mantle has come from studying the gems, which form at depths down to 2,800 kilometers and can be as much as 3 billion years old. However, "the field really has now taken on a very different significance," says Haggerty.
In May, scientists attending a Washington, D.C., meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) discussed several possible methods for fingerprinting diamonds. Virtually all efforts to determine the origin of diamonds look for chemical variations in the gems, though many of those efforts have proved fruitless, says Peter J. Heaney of Pennsylvania State University in State College.
Alternatives include detecting radiation damage invisible to the naked eye and characterizing proportions of tiny embedded impurities. Some scientists attending the meeting were encouraged by the new proposals, but others maintained that diamonds are remarkably difficult to identify and a practical scientific method for culling conflict diamonds is a distant dream.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE The idea of forensically identifying conflict diamonds came to many scientists' attention at a White House conference shortly before President Clinton left office in 2001. "To be honest, I was only modestly aware of conflict diamonds before this," says Edward Vicenzi at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Before the Clinton administration departed, it wanted to steer some research funding to the issue, says Vicenzi.
At that conference, he says, diplomats and commercial-diamond experts were asking scientists how to identify the origin of diamonds. The scientists' response was that no feasible method exists.
The uniformity of gem-quality diamonds is part of the problem. Many other gems have relatively complex structures. Emeralds, for example, which are composed of beryllium aluminum silicate with a dash of chromium, are generated by a variety of geological recipes. Small differences in impurities and chemical makeup of these green gemstones readily betray their origin (SN: 3/11/00, p. 175).
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