Download Diamond Rush Game
Fergus Marchesseault
The main mechanics of Diamond Rush, as some of the older players may already know, is inspired by the classic Boulder Dash, a puzzle platformer game released in 1984 for Atari, in which the goal was to go into a series of dungeons to get as many diamonds as possible, avoiding all kinds of dangers, such as rocks that could crush you. Sounds similar, doesn't it? No wonder, after all, Boulder Dash is so influential that 25 years later ports and adaptations are still coming out.
A diamond rush is a period of feverish migration of workers to an area where diamonds were newly discovered. Major diamond rushes took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in South Africa and South-West Africa.
The rumor in June that a herdsman had found clear stones resembling diamonds lured thousands of South Africans like Molefe to KwaHlathi, a sleepy village in an eastern province of South Africa where cattle roam freely.
Coming by taxi and by car, many from hours away, they dreamed of a turn of luck in a nation whose persistent struggles with joblessness have reached new heights amid the pandemic. No one who came seemed the least deterred by the widespread skepticism that the stones were really diamonds.
In June, a rumor spread that a herdsman had found clear stones that looked like diamonds. It lured thousands of South Africans like Molefe to KwaHlathi, a sleepy village in an eastern province of South Africa where cattle roam freely.
They arrived by taxi and by car, with many of them coming from hours away. They dreamed of a turn of luck in a nation that has continued to struggle with joblessness. The lack of jobs has reached new heights amid the pandemic. No one who came seemed to care about the widespread doubt that the stones were really diamonds.
The diamond rush has completely transformed KwaHlathi, where the village chief estimates that about 4,000 families live. Cattle once fed on the digging field, which sits on land owned by the chief. Until recently, sweet thorn trees and grass covered the patch of land. Now it looks like a bare cratered moon. Many of the holes across the terrain are the size of graves.
Crushed Diamond Powder assists with brightening the under-eye area, whilst promoting the production of collagen, helping to revitalise the appearance of fatigued eyes. This powerful eye serum contains superior bio-actives including two unique Algae Polysaccharide Complexes to visibly reduce puffiness and dark circles along with Peptides to improve skin texture and visibly reduce fine lines and wrinkles. This serum is formulated with high performing actives Hyaluronic Acid and Niacinamide along with Licorice Extracts for the ultimate in eye restorative skincare.
Diamond Powder crushed into fine microparticles, Diamond assists with brightening the under-eye area, whilst promoting the production of collagen, helping to revitalise the appearance of fatigued eyes.This extra fine Diamond powder gently exfoliates the skin, promoting skin cell renewal and allowing actives in the serum to penetrate the dermis more deeply and effectively. On a physical level, Diamonds may assist with enhancing skin micro-circulation, which along with their reflective nature helps the under-eye area to appear more radiant. The precious stones high vibration bio-energetic energy assists to revitalise and improve skin vitality.
Gold rushes have given birth to towns all over Alaska. Fairbanks, for example, exists because Felix Pedro found a few nuggets of gold north of here about 100 years ago. In Canada, a stampede for diamonds is now making one of its loneliest regions a bit noisier, and a whole lot wealthier.
In the Northwest Territories, companies are extracting the equivalent of a coffee can full of diamonds each day. The gems within that can are collectively worth $1.4 million. The great diamond rush of the north began in the early 1990s.
Kevin Krajick tells the story of this modern stampede in his new book, "Barren Lands: An Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic." Krajick is a writer based in New York City who spent eight years writing his book, including many trips to one of the most remote regions of North America, the treeless northern region of Northwest Territories known as the Barren Lands. There, a prospector named Chuck Fipke in 1990 found evidence of diamonds, sparking one of the greatest mining rushes in history.
Diamonds are a transparent form of nearly pure carbon that is much rarer than gold. People have mined about 1 million pounds of diamonds since mining began, compared to more than 260 million pounds of gold.
Once a prospector finds a good deposit, diamond miners must move an incredible amount of ore. One of the richest diamond mines in the world, Russia's Mir Pipe, yields about 12 grams of diamonds per 100 tons of earth. Gold miners measure deposits in pounds or even ounces per ton.
Diamond prospectors had been looking for a great North American diamond mine for 450 years, but Canada had no diamond mines before the late 1990s. The Ekati mine, about 200 miles northeast of Yellowknife and the site of Fipke's discovery, produced nearly $600 million worth of diamonds in 2000. Some experts think Canada will become the world's top producer of diamonds within 20 years, overtaking South Africa.
The rocks underlying Alaska are much younger than the rocks beneath the diamond-rich part of the Northwest Territories, so geologists say the possibility for a large diamond find in Alaska is not nearly as high. But you never know. In 1982, a miner near Central, Alaska found a diamond as he was placer mining on Crooked Creek. Two other people found diamonds near the same creek. Gold companies that already had the creek staked have drilled for diamonds in the area, but with no reported success. The diamond cartel De Beers has also been poking around in Alaska, though the company keeps its results secret.
Starting at 10:30am on Sunday 14th July, nine diamonds worth 1000 each will be hidden across Cheltenham and the surrounding areas, giving all you treasure-seekers a race against time to be the first to get your hands on a very special prize.
This year the event will take an even more exciting turn: the 10th diamond (the 50th diamond we will have hidden over the last 5 years) will be digitally hidden which is great news for those who live further afield or who are unable to attend the event in person. Details on how to take part in the digital diamond hunt will be released nearer to the event.
In the rocky Barren Lands of Canada's Northwest Territories, where you can go a thousand miles without seeing a road or tree, Charles Fipke was standing a few months back in ankle-deep mud at the face of a mine 700 feet below the bed of a small lake. With a hammer, he cracked out a fist-size chunk of gray rock, shoved it into the beam of his helmet lamp, and eyeballed it with an intense scowl. Then he dropped it into his battered brown backpack and turned to go. Once again he was digging ore from the belly of his own personal beast--the innards of an ancient diamond-bearing volcano.
Rich diamond veins, called pipes, are so difficult to find that only 15 major ones are known, and they're all in Africa, Siberia, and Australia. Until now, not one major pipe has been discovered in the Western Hemisphere. Yet Fipke and friends have unearthed what may be a whole cluster. To find them, Fipke--armed chiefly with a B.S. in geology, an uproarious laugh, and an absentmindedness manifested in perpetually untied shoelaces--had to track clues through the wilderness for a decade and outsmart the pursuing South African De Beers cartel. Now he is sitting on deposits probably worth billions, and Canada may soon be a world-class diamond producer. In a boulder-strewn sub-Arctic landscape where wolves and caribou roam, 260 companies have staked out 53 million acres; drill rigs brought in by helicopter have settled on the tundra like mosquitoes to suck out core samples; ore trucks rumble from blasted-out tunnels; and whole villages of geologists have sprung up. What they are finding opens a brand- new window on the supersecret world of diamond exploration. It could change the diamond market--and the wild, isolated Barren Lands--forever.
In 1978, Hugo Dummett, a South African geologist working for Superior Oil, hired Fipke to look for base metals, gold, and diamonds-- Fipke's first stab at this commodity. They headed for the Colorado Rockies, where previous explorers had found a few, albeit small, diamonds. Colleagues remember Fipke's eccentric enthusiasm: "On a steep slope at 10,000 feet, Chuck would jump out of a helicopter like he was getting off a bus," says Tom McCandless, a fellow geologist. "He'd collect rocks in a golf shirt and a vest from Kmart while everyone else had a down parka." Dummett--who himself cuts a figure somewhere between a U.S. senator and a bear--went roped with Fipke to keep from falling into snow crevasses. They worked their way up into the Canadian Rockies, finding occasional clues but few diamonds.
Since knowledge of how diamonds form and where they appear was-- and still is--theoretical in many respects, companies like Superior guard their scientific information closely. The stakes are high: a diamond mine can be worth $6 billion or more. For decades industry scientists have tried to target sites by analyzing every physical, geologic, and chemical aspect of known mines, and by re-creating diamonds and other minerals in the lab. Company scientists are organized into guerrilla-like cells, so no one knows too much about what others do. Thus, at Superior, Fipke was instructed to tell no one what he was looking for, or where. Nor could Dummett, in charge of day-to-day exploration, tell Fipke about any of the company's efforts to develop new diamond-finding technologies.
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