Quadrillion tons of diamonds discovered under Earth’s surface

Our Earth is filled with numerous treasures, many of which lie undetected. Similarly, one of those treasures are quadrillion tons of diamonds beneath the surface, but unreachable.

As per the researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), our Earth’s crust is filled with over quadrillions of tons of diamond around 145-240km deep and way beyond the distances reached by drilling done today.

Though diamond is known for being ‘rare’, researchers believe that might not be true. Co-author Ulrich Faul said, “We cannot reach them but there are a lot more diamonds than we thought. It shows that diamond may not be this exotic mineral. At the scale of things, it is relatively common.”

Smartphones would now have screens made of diamonds

Using seismology for analyzing how sound waves pass through Earth, the treasure was discovered in rocks known as ‘cratons’ that extend across Earth’s crust into the mantle. Scientists observed sound waves that were largely accelerating through the roots of old craters, leading them to initiate the project, reported The Talking Democrat.

Faul explained, “Diamond, in many ways, is special. One of its properties is that its speed of sound is more than twice as fast as in the dominant ore in the upper mantle rocks, olivine.”

The researchers then assembled virtual rocks made of various materials for measuring how quickly sound waves went across them. It was then discovered that of all the different simulations tested, the only type of rock that corresponded to the data was where the cratonic roots were made of about 1%-2% diamond, in addition to ordinary rock.

Since cratonic roots make up a huge fraction of Earth’s crust, it is now believed that the old underground rocks contain at least 1,000 times more diamonds than previously believed, equaling to quadrillions of tons of it buried underneath, as per Popular Mechanics.