14 DAY TRIAL // In what could very well be the well-written scrip of a science-fiction blockbuster, an asteroid that impacted our planet more than 35 million years ago created trillions of carats of diamonds inside its crater, the existence of which has been classified until now.
Back in the 1970, Soviet Union geologists performing investigations at Popigai Astroblem, the fourth-largest impact crater on Earth, discovered a wealth of special diamonds inside the landscape feature.
However, since the Soviets were at the time more concerned with the production of synthetic diamonds, and had other mines around the country, the entire research project was discontinued and classified. Now, Kremlin finally authorized the science team to speak about what lies at Popigai.
What scientists are saying is that the materials at this crater, weighing hundreds of thousands of tons, have exquisite properties, and are called impact diamonds. This means that they were produced when a meteorite struck an underground graphite deposit at extremely high speeds.
Experts are still unsure as to what exactly hit the ground at Popigai. Some say that it was a chondrite asteroid around 8 kilometers (5 miles) across, while others believe that a stony asteroid with a diameter of about 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) was responsible.
The diamonds “contain unusual abrasive features and large grain size,” making them ideal for use in scientific and industrial applications. An allotrope of carbon called crystalline lonsdaleite was detected within. This form of the common element features a hexagonal lattice.
The reserves inside the crater are apparently enough to supply the world at current levels of demand for more than 3,000 years. Analysts are currently unsure as to exactly how this announcement will impact the global diamond market.
According to specialists, impact diamonds of this type are not known to exist anywhere else in the world. This puts Russia in an extremely favorable position for controlling the development of advanced technologies, similar to how China controls 98 percent of the world's rare-Earth element production.
What Russia will do with these now-declassified riches remains to be seen. What is certain is that these impact diamonds have the capacity to produce a technical revolution in the global manufacturing industry.
The deposits were revealed in an announcement made on September 16, by scientists with the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy, at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Siberian Branch, the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS reports, quoted by the Daily Mail.