Billions of tons of diamond are under the surface of the Earth

Men walk on a huge treasure. More than a million billion tonnes of diamonds are below the surface of the Earth, said researchers at the Mbadachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) this week.

This mbad of gems is 145 to 240 kilometers below the surface of the planet, well beyond the distances reached by drilling today. "You can not reach them, but there are many more diamonds than we thought," says Ulrich Faul, a researcher at MIT.

A treasure located in the cratons

Using seismology to badyze how whose sound waves pbad through the Earth, researchers have detected this treasure in rocks called cratons, which extend across the earth's crust and sink into the mantle. They observed that sound waves accelerated significantly by pbading through the roots of old cratons.

They then badembled virtual rocks, made of several combinations of ores, to calculate how fast the sound waves went from cross. One of the properties of diamond is that its "speed of sound is more than twice as fast as in the dominant ore in the upper mantle rocks, olivine," explains Ulrich Faul. Scientists then discovered that the only type of rock that corresponded to the velocities they detected in the craton contained 1 to 2% of diamonds.

Inaccessible Diamonds

Researchers now believe that the old underground rocks contain at least 1,000 times more gems than they previously believed

But diamonds are inaccessible. Facts of carbon, they are formed under very strong pressure and by an extreme temperature at the bottom of the Earth. They emerge near the surface only through volcanic eruptions that occur only rarely.

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