The diamond range?

While I wasn't looking, Canada developed a $1 billion per year diamond industry. And Minnesota has similar geology, so now there's some serious looking going on there. From an AP story on www.kstp.com:

A team of University of Minnesota geologists and employees of an Australian mining company are trying to find out if there's something a lot more valuable than taconite somewhere under Minnesota.

They quietly crisscrossed the state last fall gathering soil samples in a search for clues that would lead them to diamonds and other precious minerals. The state-of-the-art labs of WMC Resources Ltd. of Australia are now analyzing the results.

A mother lode of diamonds isn't too far-fetched. Minnesota geology is similar to Canada, which has a $1 billion-a-year diamond industry, and search technology has improved dramatically in recent years.

"Our geology is comparable to Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan or the Northwest Territories, and diamonds have been discovered in every one of those regions," said Harvey Thorleifson, a Canadian who took over the university's geological survey last year and whose reputation as one of the world's best-known diamond geologists helped attract WMC to Minnesota...

I love the name Thorleifson. I've just wasted several minutes looking through the European Phrase Book (All the phrases you need to make yourself understood in 14 European languages. Easy-to-read pronunciation code for each phrase), Berlitz, c. 1974, Spanish ISBN 84-399-6132-4, looking for something wonderful in Norwegian to tie to it. Wonderful I don't have yet, but to ask "Who is this?" is Hvem er det? (vehm aer day, with the ae scrunched into one vowel), and "My name is..." is Mitt navn er... (mit nahvn aer..., same ae vowel).

On a somewhat unrelated subject, I now know that if I go to a Norwegian service station and want to say "Fill her up, please" I would say Full tank, takk (fewl tahnk tahk).