Mir diamond mine
Interesting facts
- In the final years of open-pit work, dump trucks climbed a spiral road about 8 kilometres long from the bottom of the pit to its rim.
- Over 44 years of open-pit mining, about 350 million cubic metres of rock were removed; unofficial estimates put the diamonds recovered at some 17 billion US dollars.
- Near the surface the kimberlite held about 4 carats of diamonds per tonne of ore, falling to roughly 2 carats per tonne deeper down.
- Before underground mining began, the bottom of the pit was sealed with a protective rock cushion about 45 metres thick.
- The underground mine started work in 2009 and was designed to handle about one million tonnes of ore a year.
- The 342.57-carat stone found on 23 December 1980 was named after the 26th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
- The record 468-carat diamond announced in 2025 was named 80 Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War.
- In 2017 floodwater broke into the underground mine and trapped more than 140 miners; all but eight were rescued.
Why it is worth it
On the edge of the town of Mirny in Yakutia, the ground drops away into a vast spiral funnel: the Mir pipe, one of the largest holes ever dug by people. The open pit is about 1,200 metres across and more than 525 metres deep, its walls terraced by the haul road that once wound down to the bottom, and from the viewing platform at its rim the trucks and machines that worked it would have looked like toys. The town of Mirny itself grew up beside the pit.
The diamond-bearing kimberlite pipe was found on 13 June 1955 by geologists of the Amakinsky Expedition, Yuri Khabardin, Ekaterina Elagina and Viktor Avdeenko, after years of fruitless expeditions. Their coded radio message has become legendary: "We have lit the pipe of peace, the tobacco is good." Mir means peace, and the pipe was only the second kimberlite deposit discovered in the Soviet Union. Khabardin received the Lenin Prize in 1957.
Open-pit mining began in 1957 in a climate of extremes: seven months of winter froze the ground rock-hard, the short summer turned it to slush, buildings had to be raised on piles to keep them from thawing the permafrost, and in the cold steel and tyres shattered and oil froze. Workers used jet engines and explosives to break the frozen earth. In the 1960s the mine yielded about ten million carats a year, a fifth of it gem quality, and among its finds was a stone of 342.5 carats in 1980. The open pit worked for 44 years until 2001; after that the ore was followed underground, beneath a thick protective layer of rock tipped into the bottom of the pit. In 2025 a 468-carat diamond from Mir was announced as the largest ever mined in Russia.
Getting there
The pit lies about 2 km from the centre of Mirny, practically at the edge of the residential districts, and the viewing platform on its rim can be reached from town. Mirny Airport (MJZ) is about 3 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Mir mine, also called the Mirny mine, is an open pit diamond mine located in Mirny, Sakha Republic, in the Siberian region of eastern Russia. It was the Soviet Union's first developed diamond mine, and became its largest after open-pit mining began in 1957. The pit is more than 525 meters deep, has a diameter of 1,200 m, and is one of the largest excavated holes in the world.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
62.52583, 113.98417per Wikidata