Kimberlite

Kimberlite

The Mir Russian diamond mine is the most expensive hole in the world and it is owned by the state-controlled company Alrosa. Mir mine also known as Mirny, is approximately 525 meters deep with a diameter of 1.2 kilometers.  It's been dubbed 'Diamond City' and is valued at a cool £13 Billion. From the image below, it looks like the mining town was  struck by a giant meteorite. That being said,  the crater contains approximately 300,000 cubic meters of acidic water, which roughly equates in volume to 120 Olympic-size swimming pools. 

The Big Hole

This huge open mine is man made  and produces about a quarter of the world's diamond output. Its vast riches helped transform the USSR under Joseph Stalin, from a war torn impoverished nation into a post-World War2 superpower. But open mining ceased in and around 2004, when a series of underground tunnels and shafts where excavated that produced more than six million carats of rough diamonds.

Kimberlite is diamond bearing blue rock pushed to the earths surface by volcanic magma.
The open mine is almost as large as the town of Mirny, Sakha Republic, Yakutia, Siberia 

Be that as it may, just last week mine workers recorded dangerously high levels of underground water in these very shafts, resulting in the installation of extra pumps to pump it out. However, on Friday morning whilst more than 150 people were working these underground shafts, torrents of water flooded the mine shafts and tunnels, which may have burst through from the water filler crater. 

EMERCOM (Ministry of the Russian Federation for Affairs for Civil Defence, Emergencies and Elimination of Consequences of Natural Disasters) sent in squad of rescue divers to search for the missing workers. At least 142 of the 151 were safely brought to the surface but 9 miners are still missing, presumed dead. Meanwhile Alrosa made a net profit of 22.7 billion rubles, equating to $376.37 million in the first quarter of 2017 and produced some 3.19 million carats of diamonds in the previous year.

The Mir open pit diamond mine is situated in Sakha Republic, Yakutia, Siberia some 4,200 kilometres east of Moscow. It's an area that exhibits some of the harshest weather conditions in the world, with Winters that  can extend to seven months, and flaunt temperatures that often drop as low as -40 degrees Celsius. There are harsh conditions in mining in general. Lives are lost, for the sake of gold and diamonds. People are killed for diamonds. Conflict diamonds fund conflict in war-torn areas.  The illicit diamond trade promotes poverty because more than a million diamond diggers in Africa earn less than a dollar a day. Besides diamond mining causes environmental devastation. 

The blue rock is Kimberlite,  a word that originated from the name Kimberley, 
as in the Kimberley Diamond mine in South Africa.  
The green acidic water is the same as that found in the Big Hole Kimberley.

Mining Accidents

The last major mining accident in 2016 cause by methane explosions that ripped through Severnaya coal mine in Russia resulted in the death of 36 people miners, and 6 years earlier a similar explosion claimed the lives of 91 miners. recently four workers were trapped and have died  in the Tau Lekoa gold mine in Orkney, north-west South Africa, as the result of a seismic activity. In the Chilean Mine Rescue, thirty-three men, were trapped in a copper/gold mine 700 meters underground, some 5 kilometers from the mine's entrance and was fortunately rescued 69 days later. Last year 40 zama zamas died in an explosion in a decommissioned Harmony Gold mine ("zama grave yard") in Welkom in the Free State. But the biggest methane threat is in Yamal Peninsula Russia where sinkholes and craters are regularly forming due to methane eruptions as permafrost melts.

Blood Diamonds

Be that as it may, Diamonds are shiny, yet soaked with the invisible blood and the misery of the poor, purely so that the rich can bask in their glory from the proceeds of their diamond, platinum and gold mines. So, seriously, why would you want to invest in  diamond earrings, diamond studded watches, diamond rings and diamond broaches anyway?