Who: Graham Pearson
Age: 48
Job: Geologist
Experience: He has been chased by polar bears in the Northwest Territories, ostriches in South Africa and a nine-foot-long cobra in Namibia – all while in pursuit of diamonds. As the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Arctic Resources at the University of Alberta, he routinely travels the world gathering samples from deep inside the earth’s crust that tell him how diamonds form, where they come from and how old they are.
His interest in the minerals began in 1986, when he was a graduate student at the University of Leeds, in England, and was assigned to a research project on graphite. But he was quickly seduced by the diamond, graphite’s flashier chemical cousin. Over the past 25 years, he has pioneered a method for fingerprinting individual stones by analyzing their inclusions, or chemical impurities. This helps him determine the actual age of a stone and the area of the world from which it came, in some cases to within as little as 20 kilometres. The model can also help eliminate the blood diamond trade and identify new locations to mine, right here in Canada, where diamond exploration and mining is a $2-billion-a-year industry.
This fall, he opened a $10-million lab at the U of A, where he uses one of only two laser diamond cutters in the country to smash the valuable gemstones, in the hope of revealing even more of the secrets of their origins.
“A lot of diamonds look like tree rings inside, and those growth rings record a whole history of the birth of that diamond and its life span. That life span can be 3.5 billion years, with periods of growth that can be separated by a billion years.“Everybody knows that diamonds are valuable, but it’s their value density that is really amazing. Their value-per-unit weight is orders of magnitude greater than any other material on the planet. When you do the numbers right, diamonds are something like five orders of magnitude more valuable than the next rarest thing. Gem-quality sapphires are usually next. That’s how you can have a diamond that weighs the same as a sunflower seed that’s worth $50,000.