Quadrillion tons of diamonds lie in the earth's crust

An international team of scientists investigated geological anomalies beneath the surface of the earth's crust, listening to the changing nature of sound waves reflected from underground objects, and was surprised to find a large occurrence of diamonds.

Strictly speaking, there is a separate geological service in the US that listens to sounds from under the earth and collects seismic data, because sound waves emerge from any natural phenomenon - tsunamis, earthquakes, explosions and any other events that shake our planet. The information collected helps very much to understand the causes of the birth of earthquakes. During routine research, an interesting fact was revealed: sound waves run much faster at points of the earth's crust, called cratons.

Cratons are powerful foundations in the earth's crust tens of kilometers thick, which are supported by tectonic plates. They are more stable and not subject to active migration, unlike other parts of the mantle. The cratons are rather cold in relation to their surroundings, so the sound waves are so beautiful, but the seismic showed something unusual.

To find out what allows the sound to move faster than usual in the rock strata, scientists created several computer models, and only one was able to reproduce the abnormal phenomenon. It turned out that the effect is possible only in a rock with a high content of diamonds. The presence of precious minerals in the structure brings a huge benefit to the craton. So, geological formation remains stable and does not sink into the hotter and melted layers of the Earth.

The discovery makes scientists think that diamonds are not such a rarity for the earth's crust. In fact, in the lower layers of the planet, they are thousands of times larger than previously thought. As a rough estimate, the whole quadrillion tons in these huge deposits are at a depth of 90 to 150 km. Cratons, in fact, can be called underground storage of diamonds, because it is from them that they begin to rise in the earth's crust, the kamberlite pipes, through which magma carries precious minerals closer to the surface of the earth, where they are successfully extracted by man.

Source Photo Pixabay