Diamond field with trillions of carats found in Siberia

A diamond field containing trillions of carats has been discovered hidden under a giant meteorite crater in Siberia, Russian scientists have disclosed.

Specialists say the diamonds, which are "twice as hard as normal", could be used for industrial purpose but not for jewellery.

The stones were created by the impact of a bolide – a large projectile – smashing into the Earth 35 million years ago, leaving the 62-mile wide Popigay crater under which they are buried.

The existence of the diamonds was known in Soviet times but this is the first occasion the full scale of the deposit has been disclosed.

"The resources of super-hard diamonds contained in rocks of the Popigay crypto-explosion structure are ten times bigger than the world's entire known reserves," Nikolai Pokhilenko, head of the Geological and Mineralogical Institute in Novosibirsk, told a state news agency. "We are talking about trillions of carats. By comparison, the known reserves in Yakutia today are estimated at one billion carats."

Russia's state-controlled diamond mining company Alrosa is the largest in the world having overtaken South African giant De Beers in 2009. It is based in Yakutia, a vast region of eastern Siberia stretching to the Arctic Ocean.

Mr Pokhilenko said the first results of tests on the Popigay deposit on the edge of Yakutia and Krasnoyarsk regions "were enough to talk about the possibility of a revolution on the world diamond market".
The grain size and abrasiveness of the impact diamonds made them particularly useful for industrial use, in particular metal-cutting, he added. A research team from his institute and Alrosa will be sent to make further studies.
Experts pointed out that the diamonds would not affect the gemstone market and there were question marks over how profitable it would be to mine the stones.
Most diamonds for technological use are grown in laboratories and industrial stones are usually only extracted from the ground as a by-product of mining for much more lucrative gemstone diamonds.
The Popigay crater is the seventh largest impact crater in the world.
Diamonds were created in graphite deposits by the force of the bolide striking the ground.