Russia reveals shiny state secret:
It's awash in diamonds
September 17, 2012
'Trillions of carats' lie below a 35-million-year-old, 62-mile diameter asteroid
crater in eastern Siberia known as Popigai Astroblem. The Russians have known
about the site since the 1970s.
Russia has just declassified news that will shake world gem markets to their
core: the discovery of a vast new diamond field containing "trillions of
carats," enough to supply global markets for another 3,000 years.
The Soviets discovered the bonanza back in the 1970s beneath a
35-million-year-old, 62-mile diameter asteroid crater in eastern Siberia known
as Popigai Astroblem.
They decided to keep it secret, and not to exploit it, apparently because the
USSR's huge diamond operations at Mirny, in Yakutia, were already producing
immense profits in what was then a tightly controlled world market.
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The Soviets were also producing a range of artificial diamonds for industry,
into which they had invested heavily.
The veil of secrecy was finally lifted over the weekend, and Moscow permitted
scientists from the nearby Novosibirsk Institute of Geology and Mineralogy to
talk about it with Russian journalists.
According to the official news agency, ITAR-Tass, the diamonds at Popigai are
"twice as hard" as the usual gemstones, making them ideal for industrial and
scientific uses.
The institute's director, Nikolai Pokhilenko, told the agency that news of
what's in the new field could be enough to "overturn" global diamond markets.
"The resources of super-hard diamonds contained in rocks of the Popigai
crypto-explosion structure, are by a factor of ten bigger than the world's all
known reserves," Mr. Pokhilenko said. "We are speaking about trillions of
carats. By comparison, present-day known reserves in Yakutia are estimated at
one billion carats."
The type of stones at Popigai are known as "impact diamonds," which
theoretically result when something like a meteor plows into an existing diamond
deposit at high velocity. The Russians say most such diamonds found in the past
have been "space diamonds" of extraterrestrial origin found in meteor craters.
They claim the Popigai site is unique in the world, thus making Russia the
monopoly proprietor of a resource that's likely to become increasingly important
in high-precision scientific and industrial processes.
"The value of impact diamonds is added by their unusual abrasive features and
large grain size," Pokhilenko told Tass. "This expands significantly the scope
of their industrial use and makes them more valuable for industrial purposes."
Russian scientists say the news is likely to change the shape of global diamond
markets, although the main customers for the super-hard gems will probably be
big corporations and scientific institutes.