Russia's Diamond Field Can Supply World for 3,000 Years - as part of the news series by GeoBeats.
The Russian government has declassified their discovery of an enormous diamond deposit that reportedly contains trillions of carats of the precious gem, large enough to satisfy markets' demand for 3000 years.
While the government has known about the contents of the site below a 62 mile asteroid crater in eastern Siberia since the 1970s, they have just announced the diamond field to the public.
The secret was kept because the diamond mines at Mirny, in Yakutia, during the reign of the USSR were already producing a large number of diamonds for the world market, along with artificial diamonds that were also being produced by the Soviets.
The impact diamonds, which are created when a meteor traveling at high speed collides with a deposit of graphite, are reportedly twice as hard as other diamonds.
The reserve of diamonds in the crater could potentially have drastic effects on the diamond market, and an expert notes - "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."
