Inside a Siberian diamond mine that produced 1.4M carats in 2018: PHOTOS

Russia is the world's largest producer of diamonds by volume.

More than 43 million carats were mined in Russia in 2018.

On a recent trip to Russia, I flew from Moscow to Siberia to visit a diamond mine operated by Alrosa, the world's largest diamond miner by volume.

The Botuobinskaya open-pit mine operates 24 hours per day year-round and produced 1.4 million carats in 2018.

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Russia mined more than 43 million carats in 2018 — that's almost 30% of world production. The second-largest producer, Botswana, mined 24.3 million carats.

Within Russia, diamond company Alrosa is the world's largest producer of diamonds by volume, having turned out 36.7 million carats in 2018. Alrosa operates 12 mines in remote, sparsely inhabited Siberia. Most of those are in the Sakha Republic, or Yakutia, a region five times the size of France with only a million inhabitants. Most of Alrosa's 35,000 employees are based in that region.

Read more: Photos show what life is like in a Siberian diamond mining town on the edge of the Arctic Circle, which is home to 40,000 people and where the sun is up for 20 hours a day in the summer

On a recent trip to Russia, I spent three days in Yakutia and visited one of Alrosa's diamond mines: the Botuobinskaya open-pit mine, which produced 1.4 million carats of rough diamonds in 2018.

Here's what it was like.