Rock with 30,000 diamonds found in Russia

December 21, 2014 13:15

A strange chunk of rock with "unusual Christmas colouring" which is stuffed with 30,000 tiny diamonds has been found in a mine in Russia. The ornament-sized red and green rock was pulled from Russia's huge Udachnaya diamond mine.

"The exciting thing for me is there are 30,000 itty-bitty, perfect octahedrons, and not one big diamond. It's like they formed instantaneously," said Larry Taylor, a geologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

The concentration of diamonds in the rock is millions of times greater than that in typical diamond ore, which averages 1 to 6 carats per tonne, Taylor said. The thousands of diamonds in the rock cluster together in a tight band, Live Science reported.

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