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There is a huge treasure buried beneath our feet: more than a billion tons of diamonds, revealed US researchers at the Mbadachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) this week
But do not wait not a flood of diamonds. These precious minerals are located deeper than ever have been drilled, between 145 and 240 kilometers below the surface of our planet.
"We can not reach them, but even so, there are many more diamonds than we thought up to here," said Ulrich Faul, a researcher at the Department of Earth Sciences, of the 39; ATM and MIT planets.
"This shows that diamond is not an exotic mineral, but, given the amount, using seismic technology to badyze how sound waves cross the Earth , scientists have detected the treasure in rocks called cratonic roots, whose shape is similar to that of the inverted mountains located between the Earth's crust and the Earth's mantle.
These are "the oldest and most immobile areas of the rock that are below the central part of many continental tectonic plates," and MIT said in a statement
The Deep Diamond Discovery Project of Earth was launched because scientists were bewildered when the sound waves accelerated significantly through the old cratonic roots.
Thus, they badembled virtual rocks with various combinations of minerals, to calculate the speed at which the sound waves could cross them.
"Diamonds are special in many ways," said Faul. "One of its special properties is that the speed of sound through the diamond is more than twice as fast as in olivine, the dominant mineral in the rocks of the upper mantle," he explains
. of rocks that coincided with the speed detected was a type of rock that comprised in its composition one to two percent of diamond.
Scientists now believe that the rocks of the ancient subsoil of the Earth contain at least a thousand times more diamond What was previously believed.
However, very few of these gems will reach the jewels.
Diamonds are composed of coal and formed under high pressure and extreme temperatures, in the depth of the Earth. They emerge only near the surface by volcanic eruptions that occur infrequently, every ten million years.
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