“Trillions of carats” lie below a 35-million-year-old 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.
They decided to keep
it secret after discovery, and not to exploit it apparently because Russia's
huge diamond operations in Mirny, 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 last 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 is in the new
field could be enough to "overturn" global diamond markets.
"The resources
of super hard diamonds contained in the fields, by a factor of 10, 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 1 billion carats."
The type of diamonds
at Popigai is known as "impact diamonds," which theoretically result
when something like a meteor plows into a graphite 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.
Source: Government Web Portal
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