#mirny

Myrni Mine

The Myrni mine (also called the Mir mine) is an inactive diamond mine that began production in 1957 and ceased activity as an open pit mine in 2004, although mining has since moved underground. As with most diamond mines, the rocks being dug up were kimberlites – the result of violent volcanic eruptions that start deep beneath Earth’s crust and carry intact pieces of the mantle, including diamonds, rapidly up to the surface.

Kimberlite eruptions produce vertical pipes that break through the Earth’s crust, so the best way to mine them is to dig straight down. The more excess rock moved out of the way, the more expensive the mine is to operate, so to get at the ore, the miners dug as close to straight down as possible, leaving only tiny ledges to prevent rockfalls. Near the end of its operation, it took nearly 2 hours for a vehicle to drive from the surface to the bottom.

The mine is over 500 meters deep, making it one of the 5 deepest man-made holes in the ground and 2nd largest by volume. Whether it’s true I’m not sure, but there is a long-running story that this site was declared a “no-fly zone” for helicopters due to downdrafts in the pit creating unsafe flying conditions. 

-JBB

Image credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeande/2730864493

Flag of Mirny (ZАТО), Kholmogorsky district, Arkhangelsk Oblast

A retrofuturist space design? Must’ve been one of those closed science cities that housed top secret space stuff. Well yeah, this is the site of Plesetsk Cosmodrome, where they develop ICBMs and some satellites. The Soviet Union was trying to hide the existence of this launchpad but a British teacher and his students figured it out after observing a rocket launch that doesn’t look like it was launched from Baikonur (remember this place?)

Nowadays Russia tries to use it more to lessen the dependence on Baikonur, but some geographical properties of Mirny makes it somewhat less ideal than Baikonur.

According to the website of the city, the top arrow and star represents the aircraft and a star, lines in the middle for northern lights, and the hexagon is some kind of symbol associated with the Cosmodrome. On the header of the site you can see they have a cool monument of that symbol.