Debswana -Part 1, The Diamond mine

About a month after Thom moved to Botswana he had the opportunity to go to the Jwaneng diamond mine. The Diamond mine is the largest diamond mine in the world by production. It is truly awesome. Whe we first arrived at the mine we were given a briefing from the mine manager (because Thom was taking the tour with the American Deputy Chief of Mission, essentially the vice-embassador, there was some VIP treatment going on). During the course of the manager's talk he pointed out that it was unfortunate that we were there on Tuesday because Wednesday was free sample day. Maybe next time....

Rather than try to narrate the trip we thought it would be easier to post some pictures and then describe the pictures. A lot of these pictures don't really need much description as there main goal is to emphasize how big everything is. So here we go....

These first two shots are included to try to give a scope to the size of the mine. At the top of the mine it is roughly 2.5 km by 1.5 km across. The other thing that can kind of be seen in the pictures is the 2 different kinds of soil/rock The diamonds are located in the kimberlite which is the very gray rock.

This next shot is of Thom taken in the dispatcher's control room. The control room is positioned on a tower right on the edge of the mine and the dispatcher can see everything in the pit. The dispatcher is in constant communication with all of the vehicles in the pit and has a computer that is displaying all of the metrics on each vehicle including weight, speed, location, blah, blah, blah.

The next picture is taken from outside the dispatcher's office on the tower. It's another great shot of the mine and specifically you should notice all of the vehicles that are grouped together on the left hand side. That was the active part of the mine for the day. A truck is being filled up about once every minute.

We started heading over to the active part of the mine and passed a fully loaded truck (below). Notice above the front wheel there is a LED display. That display shows how many Metric Tonnes of rock are in the truck. Another interesting bit of trivia is that everytime a truck heads up the hill it has on average 300 carrats of diamonds in it.

In the picture below, the trucks are getting loaded by this massive "steam" shovel. This is an awesome sight and incredibly loud. Every scoop of rock that the shovel dropped into the truck was about 45 tonnes. It was kind of scary just standing that close. The other cool thing to note is that the shovel is electric.

The next picture is included to show the scale of the operation and the size of the trucks. The wheels of the truck are about 9 feet in diameter. and the trucks are about 25 feet high. In the center of the picture you can see the full size bus we were riding around in.

Below is the primary rock crusher. It's job is to crush all stone so that there is no stone more than15 cm in diameter. It's pretty darn effective. We've also included a shot of a truck dumping rocks into the crusher and the mess it makes.

After the rocks are crushed they are loaded onto this conveyer system and then taken up the hill for the rest of the processing. We weren't allowed to see that mostly for security reasons.

So that's pretty much the adventure of the world's biggest producing diamond mine. Hopefully in a couple of weeks I will have a few more photos to share of the Kimberly mine in South Africa which is the largest man made whole in the ground.