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    "headline": "Siberia’s Mir mine is a diamond pit more than 525 meters deep and 1,200 meters across",
    "description": "The Soviet pit in Mirny once yielded 10 million carats a year, needed jet engines to thaw the ground, and produced a 468-carat diamond as recently as 2025.",
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    "articleBody": "A hole more than 525 meters deep and 1,200 meters wide sits inside a Siberian town of about 34,000 people, and for decades it supplied the Soviet Union with diamonds by the ton. This is the Mir mine in Mirny, in Russia’s Sakha Republic, one of the largest holes people have ever dug. A post titled simply “The Mir Mine (Siberia)” brought it back to the r/Damnthatsinteresting forum on Reddit this week. Its depth ranks fourth in the world. Still producing record stones Mir’s biggest finds span 45 years. On December 23, 1980, it gave up a 342.5-carat stone named for the 26th Congress of the Communist Party. In 2025, Alrosa announced a 468-carat diamond from the mine, announced as the largest mined in Russia, called “80 Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War.” At 0.2 grams per carat, that stone weighs about 93.6 grams. What 10 million carats actually means In the 1960s Mir was producing 10 million carats a year, with about one fifth of that gem quality. A carat is 0.2 grams, so the annual haul weighed roughly 2,000 kilograms, a pile of diamonds as heavy as a large car. The ore near the top held about four carats per tonne, or 0.8 grams. Put another way, miners moved around 1.25 tonnes of rock (1 divided by 0.8) for each gram of diamond, and that was at the rich end of the deposit. Near the bottom of the pit the yield halved to about two carats per tonne and annual output fell to two million carats. From open pit to tunnels Surface mining ran for 44 years and ended in June 2001. Planners had seen the end coming and started a tunnel network back in the 1970s. To stabilize the abandoned pit, its floor was buried under a layer of rubble 45 meters thick. Underground mining restarted in 2009 under the Russian diamond company Alrosa. The underground workings have a harder history. A flood in 2017 trapped more than 140 miners, and eight of them were not rescued. Found in 1955, dug in brutal cold The town exists because of the pit: it was founded in 1955, the year Soviet geologists Yuri Khabardin, Ekaterina Elagina and Viktor Avdeenko located the deposit on June 13, 1955, after spotting traces of kimberlite, the volcanic rock that tends to carry diamonds. Earlier expeditions through the 1940s and 1950s had mostly come back empty. Khabardin received the Lenin Prize two years later. Open-pit work began in 1957, and the conditions read like a list of engineering insults: Winter lasted about seven months, and the frozen ground resisted digging. In the short summer that same ground collapsed into slush. Buildings went up on piles so their own warmth would not melt the permafrost and sink them. The cold shattered tires and steel and froze oil solid. Crews thawed the ground with jet engines or blasted it with dynamite. The whole operation had to be covered overnight to keep machines from freezing. Good ground for the main processing plant turned out to be 20 kilometers away from the pit. The name, ironically for a place carved open with dynamite, means “Peace.” Further reading Wikipedia: Mir mine Image: Staselnik, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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