An international team of investigator has used sound waves to estimate the piece of the Earth ’s upper mantel and they believe that about a quadrillion tons of diamonds are buried somewhere over 160 klick ( 100 miles ) late beneath our metrical unit .
The raw research is account in the journalGeochemistry , Geophysics , Geosystemsand is based on decades of seismal bodily function information . Seismographers record the undulation from all the movements within the Earth , such as earthquake . They are mechanically skillful waves move at certain speed depending on the material they go through .
free-base on the information , the researchers have tried to retrace what the Department of the Interior of the Earth is like . And that ’s where they stumbled upon something interesting . There are certain areas in which the seismal moving ridge tend to speed up without explanation . These regions are call cratonic roots and are the oldest and most stabile sections of continental architectonic denture . These are sometimes seen as upside - down mountains stretching as deep as 320 kilometers ( 200 miles ) .
To explain the seismic data , the team started playing with the potential make-up of these etymon . They arrived at the finis that if these structures bear between 1 and 2 percent ball field , then the velocity of the seismic waves makes sense . This might not seem much in terms of the total amount of material in the crust and curtain , but it is 1,000 times more diamond than expected .
" This shows that adamant is not perhaps this alien mineral , but on the [ geologic ] shell of things , it ’s relatively common , " senior source Dr Ulrich Faul of MIT said in astatement . " We ca n’t get at them , but still , there is much more diamond there than we have ever thought before . "
" It ’s circumstantial grounds , but we ’ve pieced it all together , " Faul add . " We croak through all the different possibilities , from every angle , and this is the only one that ’s left as a reasonable explanation . "
Diamonds are form under passing high - temperature and high - insistency conditions notice below Earth ’s crust . The understanding why they are rare is that they only get close to the surface in specific eruption that carve out geologic piping made of a rock call kimberlite . A magnanimous concentration of them deep below the freshness , then , is not too outlandish of a hypothesis .
