Visualizing the Bloody History of Mining as Precious-Metal Blobs

If you were to sift through all the dirt and rock extracted from South Africa’s Koffiefontein Mine—a gaping, 2,000-foot deep crater once considered to be one of the planet’s largest kimberlite diamond mines by average value per carat—how much valuable material would you find?

For an answer, examine the above photo of Koffiefontein taken by 36-year-old Cape Town artist Dillon Marsh. Squint hard and you’ll notice that on the cliff slightly below center is a metal rod holding a crystalline orb. This object is a representation of the roughly 7.6 million carats or 3,350 pounds of diamonds extracted from the mine since the late 1800s, making it the mother of all wedding stones. Still, in the context of the massive hole, it’s a glassy fleck hidden in a nuclear-blast pit.