A Hole the Size of a City

In Soviet paperwork, the word "diamond" was classified. So in the summer of nineteen fifty-five, geologists out in Yakutia, a vast stretch of frozen Siberia, sent a telegram to Leningrad: "The cigar has been found." The code clerk assumed it was smuggling talk — and word of one of the largest diamond deposits on Earth sat stuck in bureaucratic limbo. The discovery that would drive half a century of digging almost slipped through the cracks before it even began.

The crater you're looking at now is about one and a half kilometers across and nearly three quarters of a kilometer deep — picture a hole wide enough to swallow a good chunk of central Paris, and deep enough to hide the Eiffel Tower more than twice over. Notice the spiral road cut into its walls: multi-ton dump trucks used to crawl along it, round and round, hauling ore to the surface. From the windows of the nearest apartment blocks in the town of Mirny, you could see straight down into the pit without binoculars — the town literally grew up on the rim of the hole.

By the early two thousands, roughly seventeen billion dollars' worth of diamonds had come out of this ground. Open-pit mining stopped in two thousand one: the permafrost around it was thawing, and the walls threatened to collapse. Operations moved underground. Then, in August of two thousand seventeen, water from the pit broke through into the tunnels below — several miners died. The mine was flooded.

Beneath this crater, to this day, lie tens of millions of carats of diamonds — still there, still out of reach.

The earth has taken a pause. And people are still waiting.

The world is enormous and one question is enough to start. moygid dot online.