Joshua froze as he felt the vibrations underneath his foot. He sensed right away what was happening. The alarm from their building blared along with the sounds of footsteps scurrying their way out of the establishment. Instead of doing the same, Joshua struggled his way to the farthest corner of their lab.
He reached out for the silver-colored equipment and his pocket notebook. Lights started to flicker but Joshua made no movements. He was too astounded by what he just witnessed from the seismometer that was in front of him.
Geologists like Joshua Garber spent their lives seeking for answers of what’s beyond the earth’s tectonic plates. He was aware that our planet has liquid and solid layers of the core but no single soul knows the exact substances.
However, the new piece of information that Joshua found from the sudden tremor in 2018 could lead to a new age of discovery.
With the help of an instrument called seismometer, Joshua was able to observe a rare phenomenon. He first thought it was just like any typical earthquake.
But when his equipment recorded every single movement from the ground, Joshua’s brows creased. Something wasn’t right there.
The vibrations were average at first. But in no time, the needle from the seismometer started to gain speed. Joshua’s face became paler as he watched the waves went crazy on the roll of paper.
This wasn’t an ordinary earthquake anymore! Joshua’s suspicions grew when it suddenly turned back to the average magnitude. The drastic vibration shift implied into one explanation only, and Joshua had the core idea.
The earthquake waves might have passed through a large chunk of a different material from the earth’s core. Joshua recalled his fellow geologists’ theories about how the earth was mainly composed of peridotite.
It was a type of rock that consists of minerals, and the only kind of substance that could cause such peculiar tremor on that day in 2018.
Joshua estimated based on how the waves reacted after it struck through the peridotite. And he concluded that the deposit was massive! This created a possibility that the enormous area under us were all diamonds!
Because the Earth’s mantle was believed to be made of peridotite which was also a mineral source for diamonds. But Joshua’s recent findings sounded like a daydream. So he immediately contacted his co-researchers in CIDER (Cooperative Institute for Dynamic Earth Research) and had them double checked everything.
His conclusions gained so much attention from the researchers and different scientists. But Joshua was confident that he didn’t make an error from reading the records of his device.
He even released an estimation that there were about one quadrillion tons of diamonds from the Earth’s mantle! However, would the experts agree with his unimaginable hypothesis?
One seismologist named Suzan van der Lee made an argument against Joshua’s findings. The diamonds might be possible, but the amount Joshua claimed was far from reality.
So Suzan calculated a much smaller quantity of diamonds. Unfortunately, a lot of people agreed to Joshua since they wanted to believe that a massive land of diamond was just right under us.
Huge or small deposit, obtaining the diamonds wasn’t easy as it sounded. The CIDER team made it clear that digging a mere hole wouldn’t get you through the land of diamond. Because we needed to attain a very advanced technology first!
But did you know that there was a brief history of human attempts to get into the Earth’s core? The story started in 1955 when Russians drilled 7.619 miles deep into the Earth.
During 1955, the economy in Russia gradually collapsed because of World War II. The country was forced to find other means to redeem their economy, which resorted to the Soviet Union to invest in an expedition to drill the Earth’s crust.
Three Russian geologists believed that it could lead to a discovery that would save Russia from its ill fate.
The excavation they called Kola Superdeep BoreHole, happened in Siberia. As they were drilling 5,000 miles, the Russians were stunned by a rock that they stumbled upon.
It was a colossal vein of the volcanic rock kimberlite! And it wasn’t just any typical rocks that you could see on the surface because this rare stone was rich in mineral deposits and could contain the hardest and most expensive crystal in the world.
The Russians began the scientific exploration with no guarantee, but the light eventually shed on them. As a result, the geologists excavated deeper than any human had ever gone.
And because of this expedition, a lot of discoveries soon made into today’s science...
One thing Russians learned that deeper in the crust, it wasn’t dry at all. Hot mineralized water found inside of every stone they cracked! But there was another unexpected discovery – gasses still flowing between the boulders.
In fact, most of these were hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, and even carbon dioxide! However, after a three-year journey into the Earth’s crust, a tragedy occurred.
The real challenge was the weather in Siberia. The temperature would sometimes drop into -40 degrees, which made the jet engines and dynamites ineffective. It was too cold that the oil used to fuel their apparatus would freeze into a solid form.
Plus, the steel beams would sometimes snap, and the tires from their trucks would suddenly deflate. Unfortunately, there were greater problems surfaced during their upcoming months.
After the grueling weather, geologists noticed something strange from the hole. They felt warm air coming out from the pit. The experts could never imagine that this unusual wind would turn into a life-sucking vortex.
And like an actual black hole, it drew helicopters and other small aircraft straight into the abyss. The geologists were perplexed! What went wrong with their calculations?
It was all because of the mixture of cold Siberian wind and warm air coming out from the hole. These sinister incidents alarmed the whole Soviet Union that led the Russians to force shut down their expedition.
But this wasn't the end of the diamond era yet!
By 1960, Russia announced the grand opening of the world's largest open-pit diamond mine, which was also known as the Mir Mine, because the location was in Mirny, the Sakha Republic of eastern Russia. This underground mine was approximately over 1,722 feet deep, with a diameter of 3,900!
That was five Statues of Liberties piled up together! Finally, Russia's endless quest for diamonds paid off.
The mine became the saving grace of the Russian economy. It began producing diamonds for about 10,000 carats or 2,000 kilograms every year! And it wasn't just any average diamond, because the stones that came from the Mir Mine were huge!
As a matter of fact, one of the biggest stones ever recorded was the "Ohlonkho Diamond" in 130.85 carats (like the size of a golf ball) and was sold for the staggering amount of $430,000. Though, the glory days of Russia seemed to get into their head.
Controversies started to rise when the Russian officials allegedly manipulated the world's primary company of distributing diamonds for six whole years! But it all came out in the wash. Because in 1991, a Japanese mining company took over Mir Mine and gained a yearly revenue of $600 million!
Then it took a couple of years for Russia to ascend and reclaim their mine again. Still, the fall of Russia's diamond mining industry was just about to begin.
Severe flooding happened in 2004 that destroyed the tunnel system. This catastrophe led the Russian to shut down the Mir Mine after its 44 years of service. But one construction company named AB Elise Limited disapproved and said it was too soon for the mine to close.
So they presented an interesting proposal to renovate the giant hole into a domed underground city in which they called the "Eco-City 2020." Unfortunately, the plan was too good to be true. It shortly postponed as the Mir Mine resumed from producing diamonds again by 2009.