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NOVOSIBIRSK, Russia — The Russian government has declassified information regarding a large diamond deposit in Siberia that was the result of a meteorite impact 35 million years ago.
Soviet geologists first discovered the diamonds in the 1970s, but research was stopped when the government decided to pursue the production of synthetic diamonds. All data related to the impact site was classified.
Scientists at the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy announced Sunday the declassification of the data, which revealed "trillions of carats" of impact diamonds left beneath a 35-million-year-old, 62-mile diameter asteroid crater in eastern Siberia known as Popigai Astroblem, according to Russian news agency Itar-Tass.
"The first results of research were sufficient to talk about a possible overturn of the entire world market of diamonds," said Nikolai Pokhilenko, the director of the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy at the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Some are doubtful of the institute's claims, though. The diamonds are twice as hard as the usual gemstones, meaning they are ideal for industrial and scientific uses, but not suited for jewelry. And the Russian government has said there is not an existing infrastructure that could support the mining of the diamonds.
"The value of any mineral deposit is not the value of the minerals in it. It's the value of those minerals minus the cost of extracting them," Tim Worstall wrote for Forbes. "With gemstone diamonds this doesn't usually matter: the value is so high that almost any mining technique is profitable. But these aren't gemstone diamonds."
Worstall notes that while the impact diamonds could be enough to supply the world market for 3,000 years, as is claimed, lab-developed industrial diamonds are usually cheaper than mined ones, for the same quality.
