I know for a lot of places, Google use fancy algorithms for extracting information about buildings and trees, and those algorithms never cease to amaze me. Anyway, Mirny is clearly not one of these places.
What's the speculation as to their surprising abundance and uniformity?
http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/diamond/chap17.htm
(tl;dr: though unconfirmed a noted diamond expert believed the Soviets had created a diamond cutting machine instead of relying on human cutters, though others disputed the idea.)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2204566/Russia-diamo...
Francis Spufford's Red Plenty gets into that, and on the rapidly diminishing returns on capital investment in general in the soviet economy in the 1970s-80s.
If this is true, then the Soviet Union must have come up with an alternate method to produce "tons" of these high quality, large diamonds long before anyone else:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond
The two methods then known to make synthetic diamonds, were only useful for industrial diamond purposes, if I'm reading that correctly. It seems like another alternative process wasn't created until the 1990s. It also seems like none of these (?) known processes are useful for gem quality diamonds, or if they are, they can't make such diamonds of large size in large quantities.
If the then-Soviets had this technology - and still have it - it would be a massive disrupter to the entire diamond trade business. I would imagine that even for industrial diamonds, it would still cause problems (you know, problems like lower prices and better availability).
"A few hours later, Clarke was looking at a blueprint for an 8,000-pound machine that used hydraulics and electricity to focus increasing amounts of pressure and heat on the core of a sphere. The device, he was told, re-created the conditions 100 miles below Earth's surface, where diamonds form. Put a sliver of a diamond in the core, inject some carbon, and voil�, a larger diamond will grow around the sliver."
Helicopters can't fly over it—the downward force of the air would pull them in.
Thus, two things are happening. First, the warm air rising from the hole is less dense and gives less lift to helicopter rotors than the cooler air it had been flying through. Since the temperature change is extremely abrupt as the helicopter flies over the hole, the pilot may lose a bunch of altitude before managing to adjust the speed enough (read: increase the spin rate of the rotors) to compensate for the loss of lift.
At the same time, the cool air pouring into that hole from all sides is going to create quite a wind shear. If a helicopter loses enough lift to hit the stream of cold air, it could easily be slammed into the side of the borehole before it ever developed enough lift or power to recover.
https://oregonexpat.wordpress.com/2012/09/20/the-helicopter-...
"They should install wind turbines around the perimeter of the hole and take advantage of it! New form of renewable energy – hole in the ground energy!"
Clearly a form of joke, but im intrigued to know why this won't work. (Or why it could work)
In Europe, most of towns are historic, they're in good places and can take any place in economic system.
In America, there are towns dedicated to mining or specialized farming (rubber?), but they quickly get abandoned when mine is exhausted or the output is no longer needed.
Soviet Union built quite a few towns in remote northern locations, they were way bigger than feasible for mining - like a general purpose settlement. Guess what, now it's hard to rationalize their existence, but people are stuck there and see it as their home. People aren't very mobile in Russia.
I imagine even when diamond mining is over we're going to pretend that this is just another town that can get jobs on its own and it will be held afloat by redistribution. It's going to be pretty miserable place for sure, I imagine.
The conflict in Donbass also has a similar interpretation: coal production there peaked in the late 70 and by the 90 it was an endlessly subsidized rust belt, with a significant minority of the population being born outside Ukraine. It is a backwater hopelessly reliant on outside help, with widespread violent crime, alcoholism, drug use and corruption. It is these rust belts that lower the statistics for the whole Eastern Europe. Young people were leaving it in droves long before the current conflict began.
The disruption by current separatist governments (commanded and supplied by the Russian Federation) have made the decay much quicker - around half the population has left, with a big part of the people remaining being seniors who cross checkpoints to collect their pensions.
A lot has been made about how these people feeling left behind relative to prosperous coastal cities enabled a Trump victory. The trends are of course much older than that.
https://koryogroup.com/tours/84
From $7,300/person, but you'll need to wait until next year since this year's kicked off today.
They can prop up Stalinism regimes. They can prop up apartheid. They can prop up the likes of Mobutu Sese Seko.
So lovely.