Russia digs for diamonds in permafrost n Yakutia

Diamonds are forever, and so is the permanently frozen ground of Yakutia in north eastern Siberia, home to huge diamond deposits that ensure Russia’s supremacy in world production of the luxury stone.

In the city of Mirny, the sun shines almost continuously during the region’s white night season in early July, with temperatures exceeding 30 degrees Celsius.

But the summer does not last long. Yakutia is known for having the coldest winters on the planet, which drag on for nine dark months.

This region—rich in oil, gas and precious metals—is also home to eleven out of twelve mines belonging to Russia’s Alrosa group, the world’s largest producer of rough carats.

The majority state- and local government-owned company employs most of Mirny’s 35,000 inhabitants and contributes around 40 percent of the wider region’s budget in taxes.

Alrosa, which has been criticised by some locals for alleged environmental damage including polluting water supplies, has a reputation for secrecy but is now making efforts to demonstrate some of its work.

In Mirny, a gaping hole of massive depths—the abandoned mine “Mir”—stretches out into the city. It is more than a kilometre in diameter and 525 meters deep, or nearly two Eiffel towers placed end to end.

Oleg Popov, the director of Mirny’s diamond sorting centre, shows off a billiard table covered in shiny stones.

Nearly two Eiffel Towers deep

Alrosa mine

“There are 14,000 carats worth around $9 million on this table,” he said.

Explosions in -55 centigrade

“Each stone must be sorted by size,” said Irina Senyukova, leaning on stones in the nearby sorting room.

To reach the next diamond deposits themselves, visitors board a 20-seater Antonov plane and head north, across the taiga, to Nakyn, where Alrosa operates two open pit mines and is planning for a third out in the wilderness.

The most productive mine, Botuobinskaya, is currently only 130 metres deep, but the company plans to dig down 580 metres.

The operating mines will be exploitable until 2041, the company hopes.

Inside the mines, the temperature drops to -55 degrees Celsius in winter, which requires an increased use of explosives to extract diamonds.

“The climate has an impact on our machines, but they are adapted to the extreme conditions,” said Mikhail Dyachenko, deputy chief of the mine, standing on the edge of the precipice and wearing a safety helmet.

Alrosa has become more willing to show off its work
“Man will adapt to anything, most of the miners are natives of the region. They know this climate well,” he added.

Trucks go down the mine slowly, spiralling down thin dirt roads dug into the rock. The descent can last up to an hour.

In each ton of ground, there are around 6.2 carats of diamonds. After sorting, the rough diamonds are transported on secret flights to be sold around the world.

Some are flown to polishing centres in Moscow and Smolensk, a city in Western Russia.

The process takes place under heavy security, which was tightened further since a small gang of employees stole three million dollars worth of diamonds last month.

The diamonds were later recovered.

Drinking water

Mirny was founded in the mid-1950s after the discovery of the first diamonds. Its first mine functioned until 2001, and it was closed down in 2017 after a flood killed eight people.

It’s a man’s world
Last year several dams built by the company broke and villages around Yakutia’s Vilyuy River said they could no longer use it as a water source.

Russia’s environment watchdog estimated the damage to the Vilyuy basin at 22.1 billion rubles (over $330 million, 290 million euros) but said Alrosa would not be held accountable as the accident was caused by a natural disaster.

Separately, the company said in April it would provide 833 million rubles ($13 million, 11.5 million euros) over five years for a programme to improve the quality of drinking water in the river area.

Miners are exclusively men, predominantly from the region but also from the rest of Russia. Planes or helicopters carry the miners to the sites, where they work eleven hours a day for two weeks, then have a two week break.

“Local, indigenous communities lived here, and still live nearby—they are reindeer herders, but some of them go to the city to look for work,” said Dmitry Averyanov, who drives trucks that survey the mines.

As for the future, Alrosa is looking for ways to re-open Mirny’s mine. Works are not due to start before 2024 and their cost is estimated at 73 million rubles.

Source: DCLA

Russia digs for diamonds in permafrost n Yakutia

Diamonds are forever, and so is the permanently frozen ground of Yakutia in north eastern Siberia, home to huge diamond deposits that ensure Russia’s supremacy in world production of the luxury stone.

In the city of Mirny, the sun shines almost continuously during the region’s white night season in early July, with temperatures exceeding 30 degrees Celsius.

But the summer does not last long. Yakutia is known for having the coldest winters on the planet, which drag on for nine dark months.

This region—rich in oil, gas and precious metals—is also home to eleven out of twelve mines belonging to Russia’s Alrosa group, the world’s largest producer of rough carats.

The majority state- and local government-owned company employs most of Mirny’s 35,000 inhabitants and contributes around 40 percent of the wider region’s budget in taxes.

Alrosa, which has been criticised by some locals for alleged environmental damage including polluting water supplies, has a reputation for secrecy but is now making efforts to demonstrate some of its work.

In Mirny, a gaping hole of massive depths—the abandoned mine “Mir”—stretches out into the city. It is more than a kilometre in diameter and 525 meters deep, or nearly two Eiffel towers placed end to end.

Oleg Popov, the director of Mirny’s diamond sorting centre, shows off a billiard table covered in shiny stones.

Nearly two Eiffel Towers deep

Alrosa mine

“There are 14,000 carats worth around $9 million on this table,” he said.

Explosions in -55 centigrade

“Each stone must be sorted by size,” said Irina Senyukova, leaning on stones in the nearby sorting room.

To reach the next diamond deposits themselves, visitors board a 20-seater Antonov plane and head north, across the taiga, to Nakyn, where Alrosa operates two open pit mines and is planning for a third out in the wilderness.

The most productive mine, Botuobinskaya, is currently only 130 metres deep, but the company plans to dig down 580 metres.

The operating mines will be exploitable until 2041, the company hopes.

Inside the mines, the temperature drops to -55 degrees Celsius in winter, which requires an increased use of explosives to extract diamonds.

“The climate has an impact on our machines, but they are adapted to the extreme conditions,” said Mikhail Dyachenko, deputy chief of the mine, standing on the edge of the precipice and wearing a safety helmet.

Alrosa has become more willing to show off its work
“Man will adapt to anything, most of the miners are natives of the region. They know this climate well,” he added.

Trucks go down the mine slowly, spiralling down thin dirt roads dug into the rock. The descent can last up to an hour.

In each ton of ground, there are around 6.2 carats of diamonds. After sorting, the rough diamonds are transported on secret flights to be sold around the world.

Some are flown to polishing centres in Moscow and Smolensk, a city in Western Russia.

The process takes place under heavy security, which was tightened further since a small gang of employees stole three million dollars worth of diamonds last month.

The diamonds were later recovered.

Drinking water

Mirny was founded in the mid-1950s after the discovery of the first diamonds. Its first mine functioned until 2001, and it was closed down in 2017 after a flood killed eight people.

It’s a man’s world
Last year several dams built by the company broke and villages around Yakutia’s Vilyuy River said they could no longer use it as a water source.

Russia’s environment watchdog estimated the damage to the Vilyuy basin at 22.1 billion rubles (over $330 million, 290 million euros) but said Alrosa would not be held accountable as the accident was caused by a natural disaster.

Separately, the company said in April it would provide 833 million rubles ($13 million, 11.5 million euros) over five years for a programme to improve the quality of drinking water in the river area.

Miners are exclusively men, predominantly from the region but also from the rest of Russia. Planes or helicopters carry the miners to the sites, where they work eleven hours a day for two weeks, then have a two week break.

“Local, indigenous communities lived here, and still live nearby—they are reindeer herders, but some of them go to the city to look for work,” said Dmitry Averyanov, who drives trucks that survey the mines.

As for the future, Alrosa is looking for ways to re-open Mirny’s mine. Works are not due to start before 2024 and their cost is estimated at 73 million rubles.

Source: DCLA

Diamonds from Marange excluded by Blue Nile

Top US jewelry etailer Blue Nile has blacklisted Zimbabwean diamonds over reports of human rights abuses in Manicaland’s Marange district.

On its website Blue Nile says: “Blue Nile is committed to ensuring that the highest ethical standards are observed when sourcing our diamonds and jewelry. Because of the reported human rights abuses in Zimbabwe’s Marange diamond district, Blue Nile will not purchase or offer diamonds from that area. As a responsible member of the diamond and jewelry industry, we are working with our suppliers to ensure our consumers receive only the finest goods procured from ethical sources.”

It is not clear how long ago this statement was posted opn the Blue Nile website.

In a report on the NewZimbabwe.com website Blue Nile was quoted as stating that “it was doing this in adherence to global diamond watcher the Kimberley Process. If one of our suppliers was ever found to be in violation of that process, we would immediately sever that relationship,” the diamond trader was quoted.

The NGO, the Center for Natural Resource Governance (CNRG) welcomed Blue Nile’s decision. CNRG executive director Farai Maguwu called on Zimbabwean authorities and in particular Zimbabwe Consolidated Diamond Company owned by the State.

“We endorse the decision by Blue Nile. It is the right thing to do. The use of torture and murder as punishment to artisanal miners in Marange has been widely reported resulting in consumers raising a red flag,” Muguwu told NewZimbabwe.com in an interview.

Maguwu claimed that in 2018 alone, more than 40 artisanal miners were killed in cold blood by ZCDC guards. Since the discovery of diamonds in Marange in June 2006, the police and army have been accused of using brute force and live ammunition to deal with illegal diamond miners.

Source: idexonline

Diamonds from Marange excluded by Blue Nile

Top US jewelry etailer Blue Nile has blacklisted Zimbabwean diamonds over reports of human rights abuses in Manicaland’s Marange district.

On its website Blue Nile says: “Blue Nile is committed to ensuring that the highest ethical standards are observed when sourcing our diamonds and jewelry. Because of the reported human rights abuses in Zimbabwe’s Marange diamond district, Blue Nile will not purchase or offer diamonds from that area. As a responsible member of the diamond and jewelry industry, we are working with our suppliers to ensure our consumers receive only the finest goods procured from ethical sources.”

It is not clear how long ago this statement was posted opn the Blue Nile website.

In a report on the NewZimbabwe.com website Blue Nile was quoted as stating that “it was doing this in adherence to global diamond watcher the Kimberley Process. If one of our suppliers was ever found to be in violation of that process, we would immediately sever that relationship,” the diamond trader was quoted.

The NGO, the Center for Natural Resource Governance (CNRG) welcomed Blue Nile’s decision. CNRG executive director Farai Maguwu called on Zimbabwean authorities and in particular Zimbabwe Consolidated Diamond Company owned by the State.

“We endorse the decision by Blue Nile. It is the right thing to do. The use of torture and murder as punishment to artisanal miners in Marange has been widely reported resulting in consumers raising a red flag,” Muguwu told NewZimbabwe.com in an interview.

Maguwu claimed that in 2018 alone, more than 40 artisanal miners were killed in cold blood by ZCDC guards. Since the discovery of diamonds in Marange in June 2006, the police and army have been accused of using brute force and live ammunition to deal with illegal diamond miners.

Source: idexonline

Israel Bourse Unveils ‘Real Diamonds’ Campaign

The Israel Diamond Exchange (IDE) has launched an international awareness campaign, highlighting the unique features of natural diamonds.

The bourse will promote its “I love natural diamonds” campaign — which it says is the first international initiative by a global diamond center to differentiate real diamonds from synthetics — over social media. It will feature several short videos, released over a number of weeks, starting with a piece entitled “Fake Times. Real Diamonds.”

The project was first announced at the World Federation of Diamond Bourses (WFDB) executive committee meeting, held in Israel last week.

“At a time when counterfeit products and fake reproductions flood almost every market, few commodities remain as rare and exceptional as natural diamonds,” said IDE president Yoram Dvash, who hosted the WFDB meeting.

“In this campaign we want to highlight the exceptional qualities of natural diamonds, as symbols of love and timelessness over the generations and throughout the world,” he added.

View the first video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuR8xHNDbKc

Israel Bourse Unveils ‘Real Diamonds’ Campaign

The Israel Diamond Exchange (IDE) has launched an international awareness campaign, highlighting the unique features of natural diamonds.

The bourse will promote its “I love natural diamonds” campaign — which it says is the first international initiative by a global diamond center to differentiate real diamonds from synthetics — over social media. It will feature several short videos, released over a number of weeks, starting with a piece entitled “Fake Times. Real Diamonds.”

The project was first announced at the World Federation of Diamond Bourses (WFDB) executive committee meeting, held in Israel last week.

“At a time when counterfeit products and fake reproductions flood almost every market, few commodities remain as rare and exceptional as natural diamonds,” said IDE president Yoram Dvash, who hosted the WFDB meeting.

“In this campaign we want to highlight the exceptional qualities of natural diamonds, as symbols of love and timelessness over the generations and throughout the world,” he added.

View the first video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuR8xHNDbKc

Tracking conflict diamonds with lasers

In a lab in the California city of Carlsbad, between Los Angeles and San Diego, a suspicious diamond recently arrived.

On the outer edge – what jewellers call the girdle – was a tiny inscription, of a bona fide diamond security code issued in 2015.

But the font was a different one than the Gemological Institute of America, or GIA, uses.

And whereas the original diamond was natural, this diamond was grown in a lab.

“Rarely do we encounter the type of blatant fraud described here,” say Christopher Breeding and Troy Ardon from the Carlsbad lab.

Carlsbad is the headquarters of the GIA, a non-profit organisation that evaluates and certifies diamonds for quality.

It assigns diamonds report numbers, which a laser can then carve on to the diamond. But this method has its problems.

“It is easy to be removed, just polish it off,” says Andrew Rimmer, chief executive of Opsydia, an Oxford University spin-out. “Also it’s easy to apply someone else’s serial number.”

So Mr Rimmer has been working on lasers that can write security codes beneath the surface of diamonds instead.

And codes inside diamonds are forever.

Diamonds are a huge business, with 133 million carats (about 27 tonnes) of rough diamonds worth about $15bn-$16bn (£12bn-£13bn) mined each year, according to Boston consulting firm Bain & Company.

About half originate in Africa, where in some countries, like South Africa and Botswana, mining is well regulated.

But Zimbabwe, under President Mugabe, used diamond exports to fund its repressive secret police.

And last year, three Russian journalists were killed while investigating the Kremlin’s links to militias in the Central African Republic who fund their fighting with diamond sales.

Synthetic diamonds are also an issue for the industry – adverts have appeared on China’s Alibaba e-commerce site with documentation stating they are natural.

Such concerns have taken the shine off diamond sales in 2019.

In response, many people in the diamond industry have been working on using the blockchain – a tamper-proof distributed ledger – to store information on a gem’s history, from the mine to the jewellery shop.

Examples are Australia’s Everledger and De Beers’ Tracr. Russian diamond mining giant Alrosa announced last autumn it will join the Tracr platform.

So it will be possible to “provide clients with a full history of a diamond, starting from the moment it was mined”, says Alrosa’s Eugeniya Kozenko.

“We can create lots of apps along the way” that draw on the blockchain, says Jim Duffy, chief executive of Tracr.

The hardest bit has involved creating robots for producers to use to scan diamonds at scale, and machine-learning algorithms to automate identifying the diamonds, Mr Duffy says.

De Beers also has launched a GemFair progamme to log diamonds produced by small-scale African miners, says Michillay Brown, partner relations specialist at Tracr.

The programme started with “artisanal and small-scale diamond miners in Sierra Leone”, and helps them record GPS locations for each diamond they find, which they then place in a QR-coded tamper-proof bag, she says.

In another sign that the sector is warming to blockchain tech, Lucara Diamond, a Canadian mining company, bought a blockchain business called Clara last year.

Their diamonds will “get scanned shortly after they’re recovered from the mine, and put on blockchain,” says John Armstrong, Lucara’s vice president for technical services.

Putting a full account of a diamond’s provenance on to a blockchain offers an “extremely secure way of storing detailed information”, says Opsydia’s Mr Rimmer. “But you still need to make sure the stone is the one it purports to be.”

So how can you write a permanent, tamper-proof security code inside a diamond?

With difficulty would seem to be the answer. Diamond has a high refractive index, meaning it bends light a lot.

“So whichever direction you want a laser to go, usually it goes somewhere else,” Mr Rimmer explains.

Engineers at Oxford were doing research around getting the highest possible resolution from telescopes, and compensating for fluctuations in the atmosphere.

And this turns out to produce answers that also apply to focusing lasers on targets that are very small.

So marks as small as one-thousandth of a millimetre can be made 0.15mm below a diamond’s surface in a trillionth of a second. The extremely high speed keeps the laser burst from heating up the stone.

Marks this small can’t be seen even with a jeweller’s magnifying glass, or loupe. You need a powerful microscope.

And since they’re so tiny, they don’t have to be on the outside girdle, which is covered up when the diamond is placed in jewellery, but can be in the top surface or around the crown where they can always be read.

Opsydia has just sold it first machines to De Beers.

But once you can write things inside diamonds, “you can write electrical circuits; it takes you into science instrumentation and ultimately quantum computing,” says Mr Rimmer.

Maintaining trust in the authenticity and provenance of diamonds is essential to keep an increasingly sceptical public buying.

Ajay Anand, founder of New York-based Rare Carat, built a platform that pulls in data on diamonds for sale from both big and small retailers.

He realised that “diamonds are the perfect data set for machine learning and price prediction”.

There are about 30 or 40 variables associated with any diamond, he says.

“So we put together the largest data set probably in existence – our algorithms can predict the price of a diamond pretty accurately,” he says.

The platform tells customers how good a bargain it thinks a particular diamond is.

And “we’re empowering dozens of smaller online and local retailers, with lower overhead costs,” but who might struggle to get customers through the door, he says.

The industry will be hoping that these new marking, tracing and buying technologies will ensure diamonds never lose their lustre.

Source: DCLA