Russia reveals shiny state secret: It's awash in diamonds
'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.
By Fred Weir | Christian Science Monitor – 16 hrs ago
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.
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.
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