Russian miner Alrosa’s Udachnaya Mine gave up a rock that is making waves in the scientific community.  Located in the Sakha Republic, and falling just beyond the Arctic Circle, the Udachnaya mine is the world’s third deepest open-pit.

Bearing Christmas colours - red and green -- the rock is said to contain 30,000 diamonds! As the diamonds were too small to be of gem quality, the rock was donated to science for further research. Findings about the rock were reported by Larry Taylor, a geologist at the Planetary Geosciences Institute, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA. Taylor also works with researchers at the Russian Academy of Sciences to study Udachnaya diamonds.

“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 ton”, Live Science quoted Taylor as saying. "The exciting thing for me is there are 30,000 itty-bitty, perfect octahedrons, and not one big diamond."

“The thousands upon thousands of diamonds in the rock cluster together in a tight band. The clear crystals are just 0.04 inches (1 millimeter) tall and are octahedral, meaning they are shaped like two pyramids that are glued together at the base. The rest of the rock is speckled with larger crystals of red garnet, and green olivine and pyroxene. Minerals called sulfides round out the mix. A 3D model built from the X-rays revealed the diamonds formed after the garnet, olivine and pyroxene minerals,” Live Science reported.

Currently, scientists are studying the rock and its origins. The results will be published in a special issue of Russian Geology and Geophysics next month (January 2015), Taylor told Live Science.