Russian miners pulled a rock out of the ground in the Alrosa Udachnaya mine with 30,000 diamonds embedded in it.
According to the Telegraph, the researchers presented their findings at the American Geophysical Union's annual fall meeting this week. The concentration of diamonds in the rock is an estimated increase of one million times the normal rate.
"The exciting thing for me is there are 30,000 itty-bitty, perfect octahedrons, and not one big diamond," Larry Taylor, a geologist at the University of Tennessee, said in a news conference at the meeting. "It's like they formed instantaneously. This rock is a strange one indeed."
Taylor is working with researchers at the Russian Academy of Sciences to examine the rock and its plethora of diamonds.
The researchers examined the rock and found the diamonds lodged in it to be about 1mm with eight sides. Scientists already know that diamonds are produced from pure carbon and intense pressure, but this unique rock is offering scientists a chance to explore some of the more mysterious processes further.
"The associations of minerals will tell us something about the genesis of this rock, which is a strange one indeed," Taylor told LiveScience. "The [chemical] reactions in which diamonds occur still remain an enigma."
Taylor said his team will publish a study on the findings in the journal Russian Geology in Jan. 2015.
"[The source] could be just a really, really old formation that's been down in the mantle for a long time," Sami Mikhail, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., told LiveScience.
