On Friday, Sept. 27, a guest visiting Arkansas’ Crater of Diamonds State Park found a 2.30-carat white diamond in the park’s 37.5-acre diamond search area. This is the third diamond over two carats registered this year and the second-largest diamond registered in 2024.
Eager for the day, the finder arrived at the park when the doors opened at 8 a.m. They rented a basic kit from the park’s Diamond Discovery Center and started out wet sifting, a searching method that involves washing dirt from diamond-bearing gravel through screens of graduated sizes in water. After a few hours of no luck, the guest decided to try surface searching, stating, “If I find a diamond today, it will probably be right here on the surface.”
Many of the park’s largest diamonds are found on the surface. “We periodically plow the search area to loosen the diamond-bearing soil and promote natural erosion," Assistant Park Superintendent Waymon Cox said. "As rain falls on the field, it washes away the dirt and uncovers heavy rocks, minerals and diamonds near the surface.”
The conditions for surface searching on September 27 were ideal. Not only was it a beautiful sunny day, allowing the sunlight to hit a diamond just right, but the search area had recently been plowed and had received rainfall just two days before.
While walking just west of the covered North Wash pavilion, the guest spotted something sparkling on top of the ground. “From far away it shined so clearly,” they said. “I thought it might be a piece of trash or a bug; it was so much shinier than anything else out there.”