A vast field of Asteroid diamonds in Russia was unveiled to the world earlier this week. The field, which was discovered back in the 1970s, contains “trillions of carats” of diamonds.
According to the Business Insider, Russia decided to declassify its immense diamond field earlier this week. The soviets initially decided to keep the discovery a secret because the USSR already had a successful diamond operation at Mirny.
This week, however, Russia allowed scientists at the Novosibirsk Institute of Geology and Mineralogy to talk about the diamond field that sits below the Popigai Astroblem, a 35-million-year-old asteroid crater in Siberia.
The CS Monitor reports that the diamond field is so big that it could “overturn” the global gem market.
Nikolai Pokhilenko, the director of the Novosibirsk Institute of Geology and Mineralogy, said:
“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 … We are speaking about trillions of carats. By comparison, present-day known reserves in Yakutia are estimated at one billion carats.”
The asteroid diamonds are known as impact diamonds and were likely formed by a meteor crash. They are twice as hard as regular diamonds and will be used for scientific and industrial purposes.
“The value of impact diamonds is added by their unusual abrasive features and large grain size … This expands significantly the scope of their industrial use and makes them more valuable for industrial purposes.”