Pearls are found in the state, especially in the Cumberland River, and it is supposed that there are diamonds in the kimberlite deposits in Elliott county.
It is only in the more northerly part of the country that the pipes are filled with blue ground (or " kimberlite "), and that they are diamantiferous; but over a great part of Cape Colony have been discovered what are probably similar pipes filled with agglomerates, breccias and tuffs, and some with basic lavas; one, in particular, in the Riversdale Division near the southern coast, being occupied by a melilite-basalt.
There has been much contirversy concerning the nature and origin of the blue ground itself; and even granted that (as is generally believed) the blue ground is a much serpentinized volcanic breccia consisting originally of an olivine-bronzite-biotite rock (the so-called kimberlite), it contains so many rounded and angular fragments of various rocks and minerals that it is difficult to say which of them may have belonged to the original rock, and whether any were formed in situ, or were brought upfrom below as inclusions.
Cohen, who regarded the pipes as of the nature of a mud volcano, and the blue ground as a kimberlite breccia altered by hydrothermal action, thought that the diamond and accompanying minerals had been brought up from deep-seated crystalline schists.
If separation of the continents occurred before kimberlite intrusion in Africa, then the Falklands would be unlikely to have diamond-bearing kimberlite intrusion in Africa, then the Falklands would be unlikely to have diamond-bearing kimberlite pipes.