Miners in Russia recently found a rare Matryoshka diamond and it may be over 800 million-years-old.
The bizarre “double diamond” was mined at the Nyurba mining and processing division of ALROSA in Yakutia, according to a press statement. The stone looks like a traditional Russian Matryoshka doll, also known as a nesting doll. According to experts and scientists, it is the first “diamond within a diamond” unearthed in the history of global diamond mining.
Yakutsk Diamond Trade Enterprise found this mysterious diamond during a sorting process and they turned it in to the Research and Development Geological Enterprise of ALROSA, where it was studied with several methods, including X-ray microtomography, Raman, and infrared spectroscopies. Scientists hypothesized that there was an internal diamond at first and the external one developed during the stages of growth.
“The most interesting thing for us was to find out how the air space between the inner and outer diamonds was formed. We have two main hypotheses. According to the first version, a mantle mineral captured a diamond during its growth, and later it was dissolved in the Earth’s surface,” said Oleg Kovalchuk, deputy director for innovations at ALROSA’s Research and Development Geological Enterprise. “According to the second version, a layer of porous polycrystalline diamond substance was formed inside the diamond because of ultra-fast growth, and more aggressive mantle processes subsequently dissolved it. Due to the presence of the dissolved zone, one diamond began to move freely inside another on the principle of [the] Matryoshka nesting doll.”
He added, “As far as we know, there were no such diamonds in the history of global diamond mining yet. This is really a unique creation of nature, especially since nature does not like emptiness. Usually, some minerals are replaced by others without cavity formation.”
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