Yakut city on the edge of a big hole

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The city of Mirny has only one attraction - an incredible hole in the ground, which can be seen from space.

This is perhaps the most famous hole in Russia. Not the only and not the biggest career once scared Reddit users and spawned thousands of disturbing comments like: “I love the airport that ends at the mine. Did you fly a little past the runway? Well, this is the end of your vacation."

Staselnik (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The city of Mirny really stands on the edge of a gigantic quarry that boggles the imagination. It is located in the largest and most empty region of the country - in Yakutia, where a fifth of the entire territory of Russia is home to just under a million people. 35 thousand people live in the most peaceful, and they are here mainly for one reason - diamonds. Actually, for the sake of them the city appeared here.

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The Mir open pit is one of the richest diamond deposits in the world. 525 meters deep, 1.2 kilometers in diameter. This man-made abyss is amazing.

It was dug for 50 years

They say that the fox helped to find the diamonds here. She dug a hole under a tree whose roots were exposed by a landslide. In June 1955, geologists looking for kimberlite diamond there noticed the characteristic shade of the fox-dug earth. Samples showed that there is kimberlite here.

In the same year, a settlement arose, a few years later it was given the status of a city. Equipment and people arrived here through almost 3,000 km of off-road. Over the first 10-12 years, the population of Mirny has quadrupled. It took almost 50 years to dig a hole of this size in the ground. From 1957 to the beginning of the 2000s, $ 17 billion worth of diamonds were recovered from here. The path of the truck with the rock from the bottom to the surface went in a spiral eight kilometers long.

Photo by Ilya Varlamov

The quarry belongs to the diamond mining company Alrosa (in 2018, it accounted for about 26% of world production). Mirny is a classic single-industry town, the majority of whose inhabitants are somehow connected with diamond mining. But the "diamond capital" of Russia does not look like a wealthy and prosperous city. Living there, according to the locals, is not easy. Especially after the mine was mothballed.

Photo by Ilya Varlamov

This happened in 2017 after the tragedy. The water accumulated at the bottom of the giant pit unexpectedly poured into the mine to the people. By that time, the development was already carried out in an underground mine, because the open pit was no longer suitable for open pit mining, it had reached its maximum size. At that time, there were 151 people in the mine. Most of the miners were evacuated, but eight people were never found.

Life by the abyss

The first thing that catches your eye when you find yourself in Mirny is how close the city is to the quarry. In especially good shots, it seems that residential buildings are right at its foot. But a landslide and the fact that the whole city will one day be "sucked" into this hole is the least afraid here. “Living by the quarry is not so difficult, the picture was just taken from a good angle,” its residents say.

Photo by Ilya Varlamov

There is a widespread rumor on the Internet that helicopters are constantly being sucked into Mir by air currents. “I dare say that this is not true,” says Anna, she has been living in Mirny for 20 years. Helicopters and airplanes do not really fly over this abyss, but no one has yet been sucked in by vortex currents.

Moreover, the airport starts almost immediately at the mines. Here, in general, everything is very close - you can get from the city to the quarry in 10 minutes on foot along a dirt road. “There will be a quarry to your right,” the pilot will certainly announce, knowing that this is the main and almost the only attraction in the city.

Regular and direct flights fly from here to Moscow, St. Petersburg and several other large cities of Russia. Even though tourists are very rare in Mirny.

Photo by Ilya Varlamov

Many people came here to work on a rotational basis, as is customary in the Far North, where the temperature in winter drops to minus 55-60 degrees. Most of the houses in Mirny are on stilts. An ordinary building on a foundation would heat the permafrost, and houses would sag and fall apart. Here, as in other northern cities, the facades of houses are painted in a bright color - so that the depression from the long winter will roll less often.

“In the summer, there are real white nights in Mirny. But in winter it gets dark very early - at 4 pm. And in the morning the sun rises no earlier than 11 o'clock. And this is somewhat depressing,”says local resident Alexandra.

Even staircases are adapted to the cold and long winter here in their own way. In every public institution, be it a clinic or a temple, the stairs will be covered with a Yakut carpet. Why? Because all stairs are faced with slippery tiles, which are usually used in interiors. We have to throw a carpet on top so that people do not get crippled. For some reason, it is impossible to do it according to the mind and immediately apply a non-slip coating,”explains blogger Ilya Varlamov, who visited Mirny.

Photo by Ilya Varlamov

In fact, the problem of slippery tiles in winter is common in other Russian cities as well; it is solved by sprinkling with sand, salt or reagents. However, in Mirny its local solution is carpets.

Photo by Ilya Varlamov

The city has two cinemas, swimming pools, a stadium, a theater, a botanical garden, several restaurants, a hookah bar and the only Azimut hotel in the city with rooms at a price of 8-10 thousand rubles ($ 104-130) per night, which is approximately equal to the cost for overnight in comfortable Moscow hotels. Landlovers and Land Cruisers drive through the streets.

Photo by Ilya Varlamov

“The cost of food is twice as much as on the mainland [as in the Far North they call everything west of the Ural Mountains]. This is due to the fact that Mirny is located in an inaccessible place, where all products are brought from Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk by winter road through Ust-Kut or in summer through Yakutsk, of course, along this dead unpaved road,”they say on local forums.

Photo by Ilya Varlamov

The locals console themselves with the fact that the city as a whole is green, with good ecology, a salary, if you work for Alrosa, there is enough for a living, that it is calm here and there is almost no crime and, of course, that there is a surreal hole in the ground, “almost like the Grand Canyon. The only inconvenience from her is the smell of hydrogen sulfide, which sometimes covers the city.

What will happen to a huge career?

After the conservation of the mine, there were no plans for it for a long time. A project of an eco-city under a dome with a closed ecosphere for 100 thousand people has even appeared on the network - of course, in the quarry itself. It was developed by the Russian architectural bureau "AB Alice".

However, in Yakutia, this was never seriously discussed by anyone and looks more like PR. Most likely, the future of Mir is much more prosaic.

Photo by Ilya Varlamov

In January 2020, it became clear that the mine still had a chance to revive: Alrosa began geological exploration. It will cost the company 2 billion rubles and will answer the question - is it profitable to restore production here.

“If the study confirms the economic feasibility and safety of continuing mining at Mir, work to restore the mine will begin in 2024 and will last 6-8 years,” the Vedomosti newspaper writes.