BGI Valuations &
Insurance Assessments –

  • The BGI staff has extensive experience in the assessment of gemstones and jewellery, allowing different types of valuation to be determined. This can be of uncut or polished gems of different sorts, at either ‘retail replsacement’ (usual) or market values as desired. Call and ask for a quote.
  • Since valuations automatically include both testing and grading as part of the service, certificates are not usually necessary for sgoods that are being valued by the BGI, but may act as a useful form of extra ‘gem identification’ if the items are lost or stolen.


BGI Anti-Fraud Inventions –

  • The BGI is primarily concerned with establishing completely new and high levels of trust and consumer confidence. To this end we have developed an entirely new system of encrypted microchips that can revolutionise world trade. The AF (Anti-Fraud) POWERTAG is the name of this device, and we hope you will enjoy learning about its multiple uses in this field. The field of nanotechnology is one in which the BGI is a leading innovator with plans to offer simple but effective solutions to some of the world’s most demanding security problems, especially fraud and forms of theft and deception.

 

BGI International Crime Investigation –

  • The BGI has a dedicated team of legal and crime investigators who are committed to the detection, prevention and correcting of fraudulent transactions worldwide, and in rare cases the retrieval of lost assets. One example: a consumer reported an offer of gemstones worth US$1.2 million, reportedly with Swiss certification. We investigated and found the ‘gemstones’ were Fool’s Gold (Pyrites) worth £3, and there was no certificate after all!

 

BGI Case Studies & Special Examinations –

  1. ALTERED GEMS AND DAMAGED JEWELLERY: many of the cases brought to the BGI laboratory for forensic examination and hopefully resolution, involve pieces of jewellery that have sustained damage. Often a customer may find damage on an item, and feel convinced it was there from new. Although this is of course possible, it is rarely the truth found on closer examination. In one case, two claws had come loose from the collet (metal section/part that holds the stone) and threatened to loose the stone. Luckily it was still there, and the ring could be checked by microscope to see if the soldered joints of those claws had ever been attached properly to their mounting. VERDICT: they had been correctly attached. Both loose claws, seen under the intense beam of a fibre optic light made especially for the BGI laboratory, showed these 2 claws had been subjected to a force at an oblique angle, leaving the other 2 intact, and clear fracture lines where the solder was still fixed to the claw sides: clear evidence of force after the making of the ring.
  2. One special examination was carried out on the security of a mine with a rare type of gem found in only one location to date, namely in one place in western America, high in the Rockies of Utah. Mine security is a complex problem best solved by hiring a very honest workforce so far as that is possible, but the finding of a type of traditionally green emerald that had all the same crystal habits and formation but for one thing: due to the presence of manganese in the melt of the metamorphic rock in which the crystals grew, they absorption meant that the crystals were red in natural light. With the gem’s atomic structure absorbing blue and green light from the white light entering it, the result was unique: a red emerald (bixbite). Actually nearly all emeralds show some or a lot of red colouring when viewed through a green light filter (the Chelsea Colour Filter is useful, a good gemmological tool), which allows the eye to see the red that is masked by the stronger green, caused by the presence of chromium in the atomic lattice.
  3. IDENTIFYING SLIGHTLY OR VERY ODD GEMS: The BGI lab was lucky to see one very odd gem, which was both blue and green at the same time. On testing, the results showed it to be emerald, but since this beautiful gem can also be bright red, and had not ever been recorded in these mixed shades with blue, a full examination was launched. The gems had a higher than average RI index, but the inclusions under the intense fibre optic lights of the lab systems showed emerald signatures that seemed conclusive. Yet how was this colour to be accepted as natural? Coming from Tanzania from a known source, the indications were that this could indeed be a new colour of emerald, but that is so unlikely to be true that other tests were made to confirm. Another expert was shown the material and doubts were raised about its origin, and then an academic laboratory in Scotland made further tests and decided it was indeed natural, and indeed a new emerald colour form.
  4. ONE GEM SENT IN WAS A STRANGE BLUE Colour, not like the characteristic paler (usually but not always) blue of Sri Lankan sapphires, nor the darker blue of Thai stones, the high iron content of which masks any effect under UV light. But there was a key: under the UV lamp at long wave was a bright blue fluorescence that showed the gem must be chemically very different from these, and it was. A series of other tests including RI, came up with a result that many people have still not heard of. VERDICT: Spinel. [You may wonder what on earth spinel is, and where the name derives from, and the answer is from the Latin word spina meaning thorn, because of its pointed octahedral (8 sided) crystals (see 5).
  5. BGI GEMMOLOGICAL SCIENCE DETAIL: These interesting doubly terminated shapes are so sharp in form that ‘thorn’ was the name given, and this in turn gave rise to the 16th Century French word spinelle, from which we get spinel. Fluorite looks similar with this same crystal habit, but is much softer at 4 on the Mohs scale (steel is 6.5). Spinel has a chemical formula MgAl2O4, and forms an ‘isomorphous series’ rather like corundum. In spinel’s case this is where iron (Fe), zinc (Zn) or manganese (Mn) may replace the magnesium (Mg) shown in the formula, and this causes differences in light absorption of the spectrum of white light, ‘taking out’ certain colours (wavelengths) and thus creating the colours red or blue and even clear, mainly. When a beam of light passing through a stone is analysed with a spectroscope, this absorption is always characteristic of these ‘transition elements’ present in the crystal when it cooled originally, and specific dark lines show up in the spectrum (rainbow) of colours to help laboratories, and everyone who finds this useful secret, to differentiate between these gems using light. [Another isomorphous series in gems is Forsterite, Fayalite and peridot, which even occurs in Pallasite meteorites examined by the BGI and many others. You can even see the strong double refraction of this peridot series under the microscope, which helps identify this material.]
  6. A New mineral discovery with gem potential: In 2005 the BGI was asked by insurance underwriters to check the identity of a special type of gem form. The fine details remain confidential to the owners, but our tests showed that they really had discovered a new type of gemstone. The gem value was the key question to be solved in this case [based on whether this material was indeed a new gemstone or not]. The test results were positive, and the value of the samples was high, so details of that find will certainly be released to the press in due course.

BGI World of Geomorphology:
1-2 VOLCANOES 2-3 TSUNAMIS 4-6 ASTEROIDS

  1. VOLCANOES & TECTONIC EVENTS: In understanding the massive geological processes that shape the geomorphology of our planet, no explanation of gem origins is complete without a look at the land beneath our feet, and how it uses heat to move its forces. These now familiar giants come in many forms, from flat areas where the lava of volcanoes flows with such low viscosity that cones do not even form at all, up to towering monsters of raw power that rise from the sea floor even higher than on land, and can be 5-10,000 metres high. Most of the deep ocean floor is 4000m (12,000 feet) across 90% of the world’s oceans, so these features of our geology are very big. They also give rise to the heat required to make rock molten, and bring the elements from inside the earth’s crust to create gemstones. They can also bring enough heat to alter surrounding rock matrix to form very different rock types: the metamorphic rocks. In these the elements combine in a ‘melt’ to make some of the world’s most beautiful gems, and oddities such as the very rare red emeralds (known as bixbite, see above) of Utah. Typically at 1200°C, the rock becomes liquid, and then on cooling the elements form crystals inside the rock. Slow cooling creates very fine, pure crystals, while faster cooling produces different forms such as glass. Those spectacular fountains of fire seen in Hawaiian type volcanoes in both Iceland and Hawaii (+Mexico’s Popacatapetl volcano) mainly, produce these black and rainbow glasses known as obsidian, fashioned into arrows and spear weapons over millennia ( formed by ‘knapping’ the stones, as with flint, to produce the radial conchoidal fractures).
  2. MAJOR GEOLOGICAL EVENTS: Greater than any other force on earth, the same vulcanism that made diamonds at pressures of 550 tons per square inch, also reign supreme in the world of nature when it comes to power and effect. In 1816 the Tambora volcano of Indonesia (near Bali and Flores islands) created such a global darkening of the skies than it was called ‘the year without a summer’ as crops widely failed. Later, on 27th August 1883 was the famous Krakatoa volcanic blast, the largest of the 4 main explosions causing a now sadly famous Tsunami in the same region as the terrible 2004 Asian Tsunami event that, with our larger modern populations, caused such a sadly huge of life. The 1883 event caused a reported 36,200 deaths, but the populations were lower in those days. The main wave was set at over 120 feet (30m), and is said to have gone round the whole world 3 times (some report 7 times), ending as a wave inches high that must have been hard to measure accurately). The tsunami, from the Japanese word for port (tsu) and wave (nami), is related to tectonic plates and their usual volcanic origins (see 3) by being the result of huge uplifts of large sections of deep ocean floor. These very large vertical sections of ocean are then elevated, often 100’s or 1000’s of square miles in arsea, so that the wave is not the usual ‘short period’ wave we see, but a very long wavelength feature that may takes several minutes, often, to roll over the landscape.
  3. The main 5 causes of Tsunamis are 1.Tectonic uplift, which is where a whole area of the sea floor is abruptly lifted by the movement of the neighbouring tectonic plate margins, causing the entire ocean water column to be placed higher than it was, as in Asia in 2004; 2. Volcanic action as in the Krakatoa blasts above, 3.Ocean landslips and turbidity currents which can collect sediment and roll for miles underwater, even cutting canyons into abyssal plains (see any map of deep ocean floor); 4. Large landslips, such as the North Atlantic’s Cumbre Vieja mountain (a compound volcano made of multiple layers of lava and ash) which is known to be profoundly unstable, and when it does slide will create a wave 100-160 metres high [powerful enough to cause very great damage in America’s eastern seaboard], as explained by Professor Maguire of London’s Benfield Hazard Research Centre; 5. Meteor strikes, such as the Chicxulub crater (see 4 below) which is likely to be earth’s largest. The best advice to remember, seen with awful effect also in the great Alaskan earthquake in the 1920’s, or the Japanese quake of 1923 (over 100,000 lost), is that if you see the sea receding fast away from the shoreline, go to higher ground at once. It is said a young girl in the 2004 Sumatran event saw this in Thailand, and instantly recognised what she had learned at school the previous month, and was able to warn others close by who were saved by her yells of tsunami. Perhaps the most touching story is that of an elephant who, in between two of the major waves in 2004, heard the cries of a small girl who had climbed a tree, and strode forward to rescue her as she climbed onto the animals back, and was saved. The Cumbre Vieja volcano wave risk [well known in 2003] is by itself easily reason enough to have an Atlantic Tsunami Warning System as is the case in the Pacific Ocean rim, centred in Hawaii.
  4. METEORS AND ASTEROIDS: chief among these that are known (as we discover more we realise many more are not known) are the ‘Chicxulub’ or Yucatan Peninsula Event, and the Tunguska Event of 1908, named after the area in Central Siberia where 3 rivers of the same name flow (see 4 below). This Yucatan event occurred before recorded history, but there is still a group of ‘cenote’ limestone pools to this day that form a neat crescent shape along the massive blast edge. It took many years before anyone realised this huge area could have been a blast zone, as the crescent shape is 170kms wide before it disappears to the east and west into main blast area now hidden beneath the sea’s Bay of Campeche. Remote NASA sensing from space shows (search “Chicxulub” on JPL NASA website for photos) the cenote rim demarcation line is just the edge, with the central impact area to the north in the Bay of Campeche. Quartz impact spherules found far to the north show that this event was probably the single biggest impact event in geological history, and may even have been the ‘Cretaceous-Tertiary time boundary’ event that wiped out the dinosaurs in seconds, literally. The shock wave from this event would have travelled faster than the speed of sound and with the vast kinetic energy of perhaps 100-1000 nuclear weapons.
  5. MAJOR CATASTROPHES: All these events have one significant factor in common, which is to show that geology has clearly not always been the slow process assumed by the 19th century theory of Uniformitarianism championed by Lyell and others, but instead it has often been so extremely violent as to be wholly without modern parallels. This huge scale, unseen by modern observers and certainly killing any life that did see them, has meant such huge events have not been accounted for in the guesswork that led to evolutionary theory, now strongly disproved as a theory by Richard Milton’s objective book ‘The Facts of Life’ [Corgi books, 1992]. The idea of a force the size of 1000 nuclear explosions at once, is a little beyond current experience. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (Entropy) shows that order always leads to chaos, and so this is why these ‘super events’ will continue to increase in both frequency and severity.
  6. The Tunguska Event of June 30th 1908 may have occurred in a very remote Siberian location without a high fatality rate, but it was only discovered at all because of the massive sound wave that was heard over 2000 miles away. There was much speculation as to what could have caused such a loud noise, but it would take time to find out. In fact it took 13 years for the Russian Academy of Sciences to arrange an expedition [in 1921] to such a remote region with no modern transport, and their findings still amaze us to this day. The Academicians found an area of about 1400 square miles of what had once been dense forest covering low rolling hills but with a subtle difference: all the trees had been snapped off at their bases of their trunks and laid flat in the same radial direction of the blast. All in just a few moments. No one had ever seen power of this kind released with such intensity on earth. More unusual, the area so flattened formed a butterfly shape of supine tree boughs over the vast area, and yet no dust was found anywhere on the site. Not a single piece of meteor or even sand was found, so what happened? NASA recently made exhaustive tests to find out what had caused this event, and they also made tests to calculate the angle this celestial body must have entered the atmosphere, and the answer was 26°, so now you know. The answer was most likely a comet (name cometa after the Latin word for long hair), and since they are known to have a frozen nucleus of gas such as methane and carbon dioxide, this would indeed explain why no solid trace was ever found. Having hit earth at similar latitude to that of London, Paris or Moscow, just a few seconds’ difference of timing on that trajectory would have changed history. Reports say that the direction of the object was roughly SE to NW, and may have exploded about 5 kms above the ground. Opinions differ about its exact height and direction, but the ballistic shock wave was certainly extremely powerful indeed, even more than the Mt St Helens volcano.

BGI Charity Work –

  • Another purpose of the BGI is to build trust via strictly fair trade, which in turn generates funds for as much charity work as possible. Charities already supported include the British Red Cross, the NSPCC, Breast Cancer Research, Cancer Research UK, ‘ABC Action against Breast Cancer’, education in Africa by the Commonwealth Countries League (CCL), and others.