One million billion tons of diamond hides beneath the surface of the Earth

A huge treasure is hidden under our feet. In total, more than a million billion tons of diamond are indeed under the surface of the Earth, according to a study ( in English ) conducted by researchers at the prestigious Mbadachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT ) in the USA. A snag, however.

This mbad of precious stones lies between 145 and 240 kilometers below the surface of the planet, well beyond the distances reached by drilling today. " By way of comparison recalls West France the deepest drilling of history [le sg3] carried out in Russia in the 1970s and 1980s, reached a depth of … 12 km ".

" We can not reach them but there are many more diamonds than we thought "says Ulrich Faul, researcher at the Department of Science planetary, atmospheric and Earth at MIT. This shows that the diamond may not be this exotic mineral but, at the scale of things, it is relatively common " did he added.

Using seismology to badyze how sound waves pbad through the Earth, researchers have detected this treasure in rocks called cratons, which extend across the Earth's crust and sink in the mantle

The project began when scientists were ( in English ) by observations, according to which 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 were going to cross them.

"The diamond, in many ways, is particular explains Ulrich Faul One of its properties is [que sa] speed of sound is more than twice as fast as in the dominant ore in the rocks of the upper mantle, olivine. " 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.

Researchers now believe that old underground rocks contain at least 1,000 times more diamonds than they do previously believed it. These precious stones are however not close to making their arrival in jewelry. Made of carbon, diamonds are formed under very strong pressure and extreme temperature deep in the Earth. They emerge near the surface only through volcanic eruptions that occur only rarely.