What is more beautiful than a diamond? A diamond inside another diamond!
Luckily for humanity, a free-moving gem inside a diamond was recently unearthed from a mine in Siberia and it is the first stone of its kind in recorded history, Russian state mining company Alrosa PJSC said.
The diamond may be more than 800 million-years-old. Known as the Matryoshka diamond in reference to the Russian nesting dolls of that name, the diamond weighs 0.62 carats, while the internal gem weighs 0.02 carats.
“As far as we know, there were no such diamonds in the history of global diamond mining yet. This is really a unique creation of nature, especially since nature does not like emptiness. Usually, some minerals are replaced by others without cavity formation,” Oleg Kovalchuk, deputy director for innovations at ALROSA’s Research and Development Geological Enterprise, said.
The diamond was discovered from Nyurba mine in the Siberian region of Yakutia, and was passed on to the Research and Development Geological Enterprise for analysis. Scientists examined the stone using several different methods of spectroscopy along with X-ray microtomography.
“Based on the results of the study, the scientists made a hypothesis about how the crystal was formed. According to them, there was an internal diamond at first, and the external one was formed during the subsequent stages of growth,” Alrosa said.
“The most interesting thing for us was to find out how the air space between the inner and outer diamonds was formed,” Kovalchuk said.
While the scientists have to decide on the exact mechanism, with the existence of a dissolved zone, “one diamond began to move freely inside another on the principle of Matryoshka nesting doll,” he said.
