TARGET 110202

Mirny Diamond Mine

The world's second largest manmade hole in the ground.

Diamonds aren't like other minerals, which can be found randomly placed around the globe. They are formed in ground formations called, "pipes". These "pipes" are cracks in the ground which have funnelled up magma from far below the earth's mantle. Over the millinia of the pipe's formation, great heat and pressure have caused any carbon in the pipe to turn into carbon crystals - known to us as diamonds.

Because diamonds form in these pipes, diamond mines are usually different from other mines, as well. While other mines can be in the side of a hill or work sideways down into the ground to follow a vein of ore, a diamond mine has to be a hole going straight down towards the earth's hot and firy core. So, most of the largest diamond mines are simply holes straight down into the earth. Even when the mines are not open pit, they still burrow straight downwards into the ground.

To give you an idea of the size of this particular mine, take a look at the lower right hand corner of the picture above. What looks like cars is not cars, but huge ore-moving trucks. The relative sizes are better shown in the picture below.

Relative sizes

The hole started small, but as they dug deeper and deeper to get to more diamonds, the only way the trucks could get down to the digging and carry loads of dirt back out was to keep widening the hole. Every time the hole gets widened, the spiral road going from top to bottom has to be rebuilt. The hole is presently around 1200 meters (3/4 of a mile) wide and 525 meters (1,722 feet) deep.

Helicopters used to fly over the hole for engineers and tourists, but now, the hole has now widened to the point where it causes its own climatic effects. This is now a no-fly zone for aircraft of every type because the winds which sweep down into the hole are so strong that they can even suck planes in.

At one point, geologists decided that the depth of the hole would allow them to place recording devices into the ground at the bottom, to listen for plate tectonic shifts. But there arose the "Mystery of Mirny". When they reviewed the recordings, all they could hear was the sound of humans screaming in pain. There is evidently something about the shape of an ancient volcanic pipe and geological plates which exactly simulates the sound of human screams. Because of the sounds, most of the geologists abandoned the project. (Note: I searched for hours for more information on this incident, but found nothing more.)

FEEDBACK MAP

If you got impressions for which this feedback is insufficient, please take a look at the following web sites for more:

Wikipedia
Image bank for Mirny Mine
A brief history of the Mirny Mine