
Looking at the giant craters left by these diamond mines in South Africa, it would be easy to imagine that vast quantities of the precious stones have been extracted from these huge pits.

In fact, if all the diamonds extracted from each mine were put together in one lump, it would only be around the size of a beach ball - though each ball would still be worth millions of dollars.

Now a photographer has created a set of images laying that contrast bare by editing a sculpture showing the amount of diamonds extracted from each mine over a real-life image of the hole the digging left behind.

Putting in in perspective: This image by photographer Dillion Marsh shows the scale of the Koffiefontein Mine, near Kimberly, South Africa, while in the foreground in a computer-generated image showing the total size of all the diamonds found there

Poor comparison: The mine itself measures 2,500ft across and 1,600ft deep, but if all of the diamonds taken from it were collected together in one ball, it would measure just 3.5ft across

The images are taken of the Koffiefontein, Jagersfontein and Kimberley mines, all of which are located in South Africa's Northern Cape province, where diamonds were first discovered by a farm boy in 1867.

As prospectors moved in and began mining on bigger and bigger scales, so South Africa became one of the largest diamond producers in the world.

Artist Dillon Marsh, 33, who produced the pictures, said: 'Mining has always been something of interest to me because I am fascinated with how people deal with the environment around them.

Stark contrast: The Kimberly Mine, otherwise known as the 'Big Hole', saw 22million tons of earth excavated by hand from 1871 to 1914, but only a tiny proportion of that contained diamonds, as shown by the sculpture in the centre of the lake

Getting closer: A zoomed-in view shows just how small the amount of diamonds extracted from the Kimberly mine is when compared to the size of the hole miners were forced to dig

'I began researching the copper mines of South Africa and the immense amount of effort people put into extracting this metal from the ground and thought it would be interesting to see exactly how much copper was taken from each.

'That lead to my first picture project using the computer generated sculptures before I decided to try the same concept with some of the country's most famous diamond mines.'

All of the mines pictured are now closed, as the cost of extracting diamonds began to outweigh the price they fetched, but the marks they left on the landscape will be visible for generations to come.

Barely visible: The total amount of diamonds extracted from the Jagersfontein Mine, collected together, would have measured just three feet across, while the mine needed to find them measured 1,700ft wide by 700ft deep