Udachnaya pipe is a diamond

Diamond

In mineralogy, diamond is an allotrope of carbon, where the carbon atoms are arranged in a variation of the face-centered cubic crystal structure called a diamond lattice. Diamond is less stable than graphite, but the conversion rate from diamond to graphite is negligible at ambient conditions...

 deposit in the Daldyn-Alakit kimberlite

Kimberlite

Kimberlite is a type of potassic volcanic rock best known for sometimes containing diamonds. It is named after the town of Kimberley in South Africa, where the discovery of an diamond in 1871 spawned a diamond rush, eventually creating the Big Hole....

 field in Sakha Republic, Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

. It is an open-pit mine

Open-pit mining

Open-pit mining or opencast mining refers to a method of extracting rock or minerals from the earth by their removal from an open pit or borrow....

, and is located just outside the Arctic circle

Arctic Circle

The Arctic Circle is one of the five major circles of latitude that mark maps of the Earth. For Epoch 2011, it is the parallel of latitude that runs north of the Equator....

 at 66°26′N 112°19′E. Udachnaya was discovered on June 15, 1955, just two days after the discovery of the diamond pipe Mir

Mir Mine

Mir Mine also called Mirny Mine is an open pit diamond mine located in Mirny, Eastern Siberia, Russia. The mine is deep and has a diameter of , and is the second largest excavated hole in the world, after Bingham Canyon Mine...

 by Soviet geologist Vladimir Shchukin and his team. It is more than 600 metres (1,968.5 ft) deep, making it the 3rd deepest open-pit mine in the world (after Bingham Canyon Mine

Bingham Canyon Mine

The Bingham Canyon Mine, also known as the Kennecott Copper Mine, is an open-pit mining operation extracting a large porphyry copper deposit southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, in the Oquirrh Mountains. It is the deepest open-pit mine in the world. The mine is owned by Rio Tinto Group, an...

 and Chuquicamata

Chuquicamata

Chuquicamata, or "Chuqui" as it is more familiarly known, is by digged volume the biggest open pit copper mine in the world, located in the north of Chile, 215 km northeast of Antofagasta and 1,240 km north of the capital, Santiago...

).