A Huge Diamond Mine That Helped Build The Soviet Union (2014)

http://gizmodo.com/the-nearly-mile-wide-diamond-mine-that-helped-build-the-1593234924

by mitul_45 • 9 years ago

126 57 9 years ago

gizmodo.com

thriftwy4• 9 years ago

In 1955 Soviet Union was already built. The peak of Soviet period is 1965, which is pretty close.

thriftwy4• 9 years ago

Then there's this consideration:

In Europe, most of towns are historic, they're in good places and can take any place in economic system.

In America, there are towns dedicated to mining or specialized farming (rubber?), but they quickly get abandoned when mine is exhausted or the output is no longer needed.

Soviet Union built quite a few towns in remote northern locations, they were way bigger than feasible for mining - like a general purpose settlement. Guess what, now it's hard to rationalize their existence, but people are stuck there and see it as their home. People aren't very mobile in Russia.

I imagine even when diamond mining is over we're going to pretend that this is just another town that can get jobs on its own and it will be held afloat by redistribution. It's going to be pretty miserable place for sure, I imagine.

dimitar2• 9 years ago

It is a major cause of potential social instability.

The conflict in Donbass also has a similar interpretation: coal production there peaked in the late 70 and by the 90 it was an endlessly subsidized rust belt, with a significant minority of the population being born outside Ukraine. It is a backwater hopelessly reliant on outside help, with widespread violent crime, alcoholism, drug use and corruption. It is these rust belts that lower the statistics for the whole Eastern Europe. Young people were leaving it in droves long before the current conflict began.

The disruption by current separatist governments (commanded and supplied by the Russian Federation) have made the decay much quicker - around half the population has left, with a big part of the people remaining being seniors who cross checkpoints to collect their pensions.

asveikau2• 9 years ago

If you get away from coastal cities you see similar phenomena in the US. I have family that grew up in a coal town in Pennsylvania where coal is long gone. The big employers are mostly fulfilment centers and the primary claim to fame is now its descendants of 19th and 20th century European immigrants enacting discriminatory housing policy towards the new wave of Latino immigrants.

A lot has been made about how these people feeling left behind relative to prosperous coastal cities enabled a Trump victory. The trends are of course much older than that.

supahfly_remix2• 9 years ago

  Helicopters can't fly over it—the downward force of the air would pull them in.

Can someone explain the physics of this? The air above the hold is at the same pressure as that beside the hole, otherwise there would be a constant wind. Also, above a certain altitude helicopters don't rely on ground effects.

georgecmu• 9 years ago

If a hole is deep enough — and a half-kilometer deep hole qualifies — the earth will warm the air inside it. The deeper the hole, the warmer the air. Warm air rises, and cool air sinks, so with a big temperature difference between in-hole air and aboveground air, you get quite a bit of air movement.

Thus, two things are happening. First, the warm air rising from the hole is less dense and gives less lift to helicopter rotors than the cooler air it had been flying through. Since the temperature change is extremely abrupt as the helicopter flies over the hole, the pilot may lose a bunch of altitude before managing to adjust the speed enough (read: increase the spin rate of the rotors) to compensate for the loss of lift.

At the same time, the cool air pouring into that hole from all sides is going to create quite a wind shear. If a helicopter loses enough lift to hit the stream of cold air, it could easily be slammed into the side of the borehole before it ever developed enough lift or power to recover.

https://oregonexpat.wordpress.com/2012/09/20/the-helicopter-...

trevyn• 9 years ago

Nit: most helis have an automatic governor that keeps rotor RPM relatively constant; the pilot adjusts the blade pitch to control lift, and the throttle is automatically adjusted to compensate for the change in engine load.

supahfly_remix2• 9 years ago

thank you for the explanation.

davidwihl• 9 years ago

Given the odd local microclimate, I would not want to be on a low and slow approach to runway 6 at the nearby Mirny airport, especially in a slow-to-spool turbojet. I bet the Soviets never published accurate accident data.

nonbel• 9 years ago

Are they sure it is the earth warming it and not just the continuation of the lapse rate[1]? How much warmer is it at the bottom? If it is 5-10 C warmer that could just be the atmosphere getting thicker.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapse_rate

quakeguy• 9 years ago

One comment from that link made me curious.

"They should install wind turbines around the perimeter of the hole and take advantage of it! New form of renewable energy – hole in the ground energy!"

Clearly a form of joke, but im intrigued to know why this won't work. (Or why it could work)

willvarfar2• 9 years ago

These diamonds were all of a uniform size and shape and were dubbed 'Silver Bears'. While DeBeers could not understand how the Soviets were producing such a large quantity of gem diamonds of such uniform size, and supposedly from one mine that by DeBeers surveys should not be capable of such diamond production, they were, nevertheless, pressured to purchase them all lest the Soviets simply dump the diamonds on the open market, thus flooding it and bringing down diamond prices.

What's the speculation as to their surprising abundance and uniformity?

ljoshua• 9 years ago

I was curious about that particular aspect as well. A little Googling brought me to this rather interesting account of Silver Bears and the market forces at play:

http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/diamond/chap17.htm

(tl;dr: though unconfirmed a noted diamond expert believed the Soviets had created a diamond cutting machine instead of relying on human cutters, though others disputed the idea.)

milcron2• 9 years ago

It sounds as though they were creating gem-quality synthetic diamonds but kept it on the down-low, and used their Siberian mines as cover.

ghostly_s2• 9 years ago

The general opinion is this is a synthetic diamond laundering operation. Synthetic diamonds are of course chemically identical to natural, but natural diamonds still fetch a higher price.

gambiting3• 9 years ago

I thought there were ways to tell synthetic from natural? Surely DeBeers were particularly interested in discrediting Soviet diamonds and if they could find proof that those were indeed synthetic, they would have used it?

cr0sh• 9 years ago

The general opinion is this is a synthetic diamond laundering operation.

If this is true, then the Soviet Union must have come up with an alternate method to produce "tons" of these high quality, large diamonds long before anyone else:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond

The two methods then known to make synthetic diamonds, were only useful for industrial diamond purposes, if I'm reading that correctly. It seems like another alternative process wasn't created until the 1990s. It also seems like none of these (?) known processes are useful for gem quality diamonds, or if they are, they can't make such diamonds of large size in large quantities.

If the then-Soviets had this technology - and still have it - it would be a massive disrupter to the entire diamond trade business. I would imagine that even for industrial diamonds, it would still cause problems (you know, problems like lower prices and better availability).

mustacheemperor• 9 years ago

Do you have a source for that statement? If I'm not mistaken synthetic diamonds are almost always detectable by experienced gemologists (like the ones working at Debeers, presumably), and the timeline of synthetic diamond technology wouldn't line up either.

arm85• 9 years ago

https://www.wired.com/2003/09/diamond/

"A few hours later, Clarke was looking at a blueprint for an 8,000-pound machine that used hydraulics and electricity to focus increasing amounts of pressure and heat on the core of a sphere. The device, he was told, re-created the conditions 100 miles below Earth's surface, where diamonds form. Put a sliver of a diamond in the core, inject some carbon, and voil�, a larger diamond will grow around the sliver."

mirimir• 9 years ago

Maybe the Soviets stockpiled these diamonds for some years, before developing a relationship with DeBeers.

dankohn1• 9 years ago

I remember hearing a story about diamond polishing methods in use right after the collapse of the Soviet Union where the resulting diamonds had a lower value than their inputs. I've used the metaphor in programming and management of dealing with value-subtracting workers.

jordanb• 9 years ago

This was a criticism of the late-stage soviet economy: Taking perfectly good trees and turning them into useless plywood. Perfectly good wool gets turned into sweaters so awful even Soviet citizens won't wear them, etc.

Francis Spufford's Red Plenty gets into that, and on the rapidly diminishing returns on capital investment in general in the soviet economy in the 1970s-80s.

tastytang• 9 years ago

Possibly these unusual diamonds were not mined nor manufactured, but were the result of a meteor impact?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2204566/Russia-diamo...

nthcolumn• 9 years ago

Someone told me about this in 2009. I do not know if it is just a rumor. We were in a piano bar in the old town in Zuerich. I did not know them but they were serious people who lead interesting enough lives not to have to make up stories. Although now I see Daily Mail I am beginning to doubt. He said they are all huge, same in size but hard to work and that there was a 'mother' one which was enormous. His friend sang 'Simply the Best' for Putin. Is it true?

EA• 9 years ago

Google Maps view: https://goo.gl/maps/HufFo7ZMP1T2

ortusdux• 9 years ago

This mine is the first thing I zoom in on when checking out a new procedurally generated 3d world map service. It is easy to spot because of the nearby Vilyuy Reservoir built to power the mine. Everyone's algorithm can handle mountians, but I've yet to see one that correctly renders this crater. Even google earth shows the mine as flat.

anigbrowl• 9 years ago

a new procedurally generated 3d world map service

Don't tempt us with interesting details like that and then leave out the name :)

traek• 9 years ago

S/he gave an example already--Google Earth. Apple Maps also has generated 3D maps.

mvindahl• 9 years ago

Not sure, but maybe Google is just using some readily available set of topological data? The hole, being man-made, would display as flat in the same ways that do the buildings of Mirny.

I know for a lot of places, Google use fancy algorithms for extracting information about buildings and trees, and those algorithms never cease to amaze me. Anyway, Mirny is clearly not one of these places.

ocschwar• 9 years ago

Diamonds. Is there anything they won''t do?

They can prop up Stalinism regimes. They can prop up apartheid. They can prop up the likes of Mobutu Sese Seko.

So lovely.

jpatokal• 9 years ago

This is one of many insane places on Koryo's "Abandoned Russia" tours, which have long been on my bucket list:

https://koryogroup.com/tours/84

From $7,300/person, but you'll need to wait until next year since this year's kicked off today.

jeffdavis• 9 years ago

Can someone please explain why a helicopter can't go over the hole but a plane can?

c517402• 9 years ago

The article says that helicopters can't fly over the mine. But, the end of the runway is close by and the flight path is almost tangent to the edge of the hole. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mirny,+Sakha+Republic,+Rus...

A Huge Diamond Mine That Helped Build The Soviet Union (2014)

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