Dear all, I'm happy to invite you to discover a new field video on "Field Gemology by Vincent Pardieu". During a field expedition in June 2018 we visited the KAGEM emerald mine in the Kafubu area in Zambia in order to collect reference samples for the "Bahrain Institute for Pearls & Gemstones (DANAT)".
Emeralds mining started in the Kafubu area in Zambia during the 1960's but it is only after the 1980's that Zambia became a major producer of emeralds. In 2008 Gemfields took control of the KAGEM mine and turned it into a modern very sophisticated and efficient operation. They combined several small open pits into a huge one called the Chama pit. With more than 1km wide and long and over 120 meters deep, it is the World's largest emerald mining pit. In this pit we can witness a combination of mechanized mining (when the miners work to remove the rocks that do not host emeralds) and hand mining when the miners get close to the emerald rich reaction zone between the pegmatites (rich in beryllium) and the talc-magnetite-schist (rich in chromium).
Many thanks to all the people we met in Zambia during that field expedition for DANAT and a very special thanks everybody at Kagem and Gemfields for their welcome and support in order to allow us to collect on site, inside the mine, the research samples requested by DANAT
Enjoy!