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Huge Diamond Deposits Revealed In Russia
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from the Christian Science Monitor: "'Russia has just declassified news that will shake world gem markets to their core: the discovery of a vast new diamond field containing 'trillions of carats,' enough to supply global markets for another 3,000 years. The Soviets discovered the bonanza back in the 1970s beneath a 35-million-year-old, 62-mile diameter asteroid crater in eastern Siberia known as Popigai Astroblem. They decided to keep it secret, and not to exploit it, apparently because the USSR's huge diamond operations at Mirny, in Yakutia, were already producing immense profits in what was then a tightly controlled world market."
Impact the price of the Damned shiny rocks that I buy for my wife?
I remember learning about DeBeers and having this bit of information come up at some point.... lots of people in Russia dying mysterious deaths surrounding the topic of diamonds in Russia.
Diamonds are fairly plentiful and common. That they are expensive and considered valuable is marketing... or racketeering... whatever you want to call it.
please let this drop diamond prices down to what they should be and force deBeers to find other ways to earn money like flipping burgers or whatever they have where they are
Reading through TFA it sounds like these are industrial quality diamonds rather than the sparkly, clear, goes on a ring type. Still a big find though.
Unlike Gold, or even many other gemstones which have a rarity that enhances value? Diamonds are only of spectacular value, when they achieve very large carat size, without flaws or inclusions.
But there's a mystique , deliberately crafted, to conflate the value of a 2-carat Zales engagement ring with something like the Koh-i-noor.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
We've known about this for years. All the fucking diamonds are radioactive as hell.
Graphite field + meteor impact = nuclear diamonds.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
This makes me wonder if there has ever been a more successful cartel. The last time it was threatened was when they found them in Canada. Of course the Canadians knew better than to just let them out in a free market. Even if you're not in DeBeers, everybody understands that you have to release.... them... slowly...
Show her you really care by spending outrageous cartel prices. Has to be one of the greatest scams in history.
This will help the Russian government stay corrupt even after they run out of oil.
In Soviet Russia, diamonds find you.
So the USSR was financially strangled during the Cold War by low oil prices while at the same time they had these diamond deposits?
I recall reading that some time ago De Beers had conspired with GE to fix the price of industrial diamonds. I've also been told that synthetic diamonds can be produced with higher quality than most naturally occurring diamonds, but their manufacture is kept at a relative minimum to keep prices high. Although apparently De Beer's monopoly isn't what it used to be, not that it means an end to price fixing or other questionable practices.
as long as you keep it a secret.
Cue "In Soviet Russia" in 3...2...1... dammit, too late!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
There's diamonds in them thar hills!
My kingdom for a donkey!
Control supply and stimulate demand. The 'tradition' of a diamond engagement ring is a DeBeers invention that dates to the twenties. Also DeBeers subsidizes advertising. Jewelers can get money from DeBeers to help them place ads provided they stick to certain themes. DeBeers will even supply stock art. Something else few people realize. DeBeers is heavily invested in gold production. They own controlling interest in a lot of mines. So it is not only diamonds that have been manipulated, but gold as well. Same deal: stimulate demand with subsidized ads and control supply. Gold is not as well controlled as are diamonds, but a review of the recent price trend gives a clue. Watch what happens to gold when the world economy goes back on the boil. It may be a while, but trust me. The people who cornered this market will clean TF up.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
A peer reviewed paper describing the occurrence is here (paywalled):
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1945-5100.1998.tb01639.x/abstract
The diamonds are ~0.2-0.5mm, elongate or tabular layered grains. They are sometimes colorless but often are yellow, grey, or black. Rarely there are diamonds which reach 10mm found in the alluvial gravel.
If the deposit is as rich as the article claims it looks like an excellent source for industrial diamonds, although given how fractured they are it won't change the gem diamond market much.
...and suddenly Putin decides he wants to deal in diamonds.
Yeah it's almost like someone decided to put a funny pattern on some paper, cut it up into small rectangles, and declare it worth something. Can you imagine people accepting something like that?! A completely artificially-restricted supply of controlled by one organization! What next, they arrest people who try and print their own!?
In seriousness, there is no value beyond consensus. Gold is not any more intrinsically valuable than diamonds (or fiat currency!); people simply agree to trade a certain amount of one thing (paper, bank balance, etc) for it. This is why people pay for BitCoins (and other virtual goods), why currency fluctuates, and in essence, how the economy works.
(The malleability of gold and other arguments of function are entirely irrelevant; people always agree on value for some reason, from "I have too much money and I felt like it," to "I need it for my research." Reason is a constant, and one reason is not inherently better or more valid than another.)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
They are obviously planing to build a weapon of mass destruction satellite with it!
Forgive my ignorance but I thought diamond was a defined crystal lattice structure. How can it be "twice as hard" if it is a diamond? Is this another naturally occurring state of carbon that should be called something else?
The Washington Monument was supposed to be capped with the world's most expensive metal -- aluminum. Perhaps diamonds will go the same way as aluminum did and become proliffic. Overheard in the not too distant future: "That Cubic Zirconia looks so good on you, it looks so much better than those diamonds, they're _everywhere_!"
http://www.gifbin.com/981440
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
There are diamond reserves in the older regions of Africa and North America. It is not surprising that there are diamonds in the centre of Asia as well. The geology is similar. Basically what you need is an area with very old rock that hasn't been hugely disturbed by geological processes. The Canadian Shield contains 3 to 4 billion year old rock, and I believe there are also areas with similar rocks in both central Africa and central Asia. Diamonds can be found in areas with rocks with ages more than 2.5 billion years. I think this is because the kimberlite pipes that bring them to the surface only happened that long ago, though I'm not absolutely sure of this. Once deposited by those pipes, the diamonds remain at or near the surface, where they can be mined.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Your monopoly is gone. New monopolists such as Monsanto and MPIAA are taking over.
I have no idea these days, but last time I spec'd out the purchase of carbide cutting inserts they weren't much more than $5 when sintered into your desired shape in bulk. Wouldn't the diamonds burn up pretty easily?
Fiancees who reject the diamond industry!
Yay for rejecting the marketing that every engagement needs a big sparkly rock!
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
This just makes me even more curious about why the geological community is covering up the obvious impact crater in Tennessee!
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/08/28/2217237/tennessee-crater-inches-toward-recognition
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
Back in the eighties I spent 6 years in Udachny (see the nick?) What are and were near 20,000 people doing so far north? Why was there an underground nuclear explosion there? Diamonds. For the longest time that place supplied 80% of Soviet and then Russian diamonds. Udachny is the deepest open diamond mine at 610 meters. The largest diamond in Russia was found there on the 23 of December 1980. It was 48x36x25 mm, at 342.5ct, it was very clear, yellow stone.
Some pictures.
Russia is full of diamonds, but mostly they are small, used to make drill bits, parts of machines.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
I was planning to move to Russia and marry a babushka and start a goat farm,
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Searching on the web I found a number of references to Popigai including a PDF report (http://geology.mines.edu/faculty/Klee/Popigai.pdf) dating back to 2004 from the Colorado school of Mines. If it were to have such a great impact on the prices of diamonds for consumers I'm guessing it would have happened a long time ago. Of course time will tell.
Diamonds are very common. However, large carat diamonds are not. Very large diamonds are indeed quite rare. As well as the fancy color diamonds. Red diamonds being quite rare indeed. Why people are willing to pay so much for plain old white diamonds is a mystery to me. Certainly flawless diamonds are more rare, but considering DeBeers, et al are sitting on the motherlode of them, it's hard to know just how much more rare they are, if at all.
In Soviet Russia....diamonds buy you.
But the thing is, you only need like .00001% of them to be gem quality to have a shit load of gem quality diamonds.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The Soviets discovered the bonanza back in the 1970s
The USSR was selling synthetic gem diamonds in the 70s
In soviet Russia, synthetic diamond comes from big crater in the ground.
This potentially devalues my fiancée. Negative equity on the house and fiancée, ho hum
Diamonds used to sell for around $8000 for a 1 Ct stone in 1995 and now it sells for about $3000. So if you happen to be the proud owner of a stone bought 20 years ago, then you may be unhappy with the price, but the stone is still the same, whereas a car bought for $8000 in 1995...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Nuclear weapons do not "rely on mushing things together quickly enough to generate fission." Nuclear weapons take material that is already fissioning at a very low rate -- or on the edge of doing so, and can be made to do so by the addition of the appropriate neutron source -- and "mushes it together" fast enough and dense enough that the resulting chain reaction occurs very rapidly, creating an explosion instead of just a general warming of the material.
The "mushing" is what creates the explosion, not what creates the fission. The fission is a property of the material itself, which is why the international control of fissionable material -- primarily plutonium and enriched uranium -- is sufficient to control the spread of nuclear weapons (in theory). Nuclear arms control is not done by controlling "things that mush."
My future wife tells me that she wants a nice ring. I mean hell, if I need to spend $3000 on her for a ring, I can do that. I love her. I mean, for some reason I need to have a nicely built PC that most people think is useless. We all have our niches. If she wants to wear a shiny piece of rock on her finger, then I can handle that. She makes me happy, and I want to make her as equally happy.
You mean supply of diamonds could effect their prices? But according to the Communist economic theory it's the labor that goes into producing the goods that acts as the deciding factor on the prices. Don't we all know now that "hard working" is the same as "most useful"? Oh, wait, that's not a Soviet mantra... anymore. Everything new is a well-forgotten old.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Right here, sir. This group bought the crystal reactors (and presumably also hired personnel) from the previous corporation that went bankrupt trying to make and sell synthesized diamonds. You can even buy stock in the company.
http://www.sciodiamond.com/
You forgot at least two things:
Otherwise, you almost wrote a mostly accurate and factual comment, roman_mir.
I want to chime in like others on this point.
I was surprised a few months ago to find out that diamonds are NOT valuable. Diamonds, even natural ones, are not rare. Diamonds are in plentiful supply and the price is kept Artificially HIGH by the DeBeers family who buys up or otherwise controls the excess.
When you buy that engagement ring, you may be showing your fiance that you are willing to sacrifice a large portion of your savings to give her a conventional symbol for the extent of your love..........but you aren't giving her anything value.
Sapphire never wears and can be colourless so they're useful for things that require durability such as ..say a camera lens!
It was also mentioned in a previous /. article for being arguably the best material for data storage with practically infinite lifespan.
It depends on YOU. Don't date shitty girls.
That's how it works. Lure the women and the men will follow. It's women they target.
In Soviet Russia diamond buys you?
Apollo Diamond, Inc., in Boston. They make diamonds so good that the only way DeBeersRacketeers can tell that they are man made is because they are too perfect. No flaws at all.
Women want to know that men aren't just in it for the action. Cash would make a nice signal of male intent, but from the male side, it's too darn fungible. The man wants to make sure the women isn't in it just to reap the reliable signal.
Enter the diamond: expensive to buy (reliable signal to women), lousy to resell (putting the men more at ease), and a nice racket for the middlemen, who supply the tsunami of romantic propaganda to wrap the whole ridiculous spectacle in broad public approval.
They are just shiny coal, what's the big deal. They even burn like coal. Waste of money. I guess De-Beers will have an increasing amount of trouble keeping a lid on the diamond market sooner or later.
Paul E. Bahre
I am glad to hear it, I have always thought that the blood diamond problem in Africa was something that could be avoided if we saturated the market with enough diamonds to bring the price way down...and now we have trillions of carots! SO bring it all out at once, saturate the market and become worthless....and
you will see no more diamonds coming out of africa....
Now will this ever happen, probably not, because I am sure some people will try their best to not let this happen....but if it was the Chinese, you think they would care about that.....they would bring out as much as possible and sell the stuff overnight if they could...bringing about a market crash for anyone who has stocks in diamonds...