In 2018 and a group of international scientists made a dazzling discovery. While analyzing how sound moves deep beneath the surface of the Earth, they identify a curious anomaly. So they design and execute a research project – and before long, they arrive at an extraordinary conclusion. Hidden far below the surface of the Earth is an enormous cache of precious diamonds.
Of course, diamonds consist of one of the most abundant and versatile elements on the planet: carbon. From carbon comes carbohydrates, which are essential for the growth, repair and functioning of organic tissue. And from carbon comes fossil fuels and plastics, as well as carbon dioxide, which plants require for respiration. In diamonds, however, carbon is arranged in a rare crystalline atomic structure – a so-called diamond cubic.
Thanks to their crystalline structure, diamonds have high optical dispersion. This means they have the capacity to fragment white light into an array of colors, which we perceive as a characteristic sparkle. As such, diamonds are prized for their ornamental value. They are also extremely old – between 1.5 and 3.5 billion years. And for that reason, diamonds are often marketed as symbols of eternal love.
But diamonds are not merely sparkly gems. They are also exceptionally hard and make good conductors of heat. As such, they are sometimes used in industrial machinery, particularly in polishing and cutting. They are also a key component in diamond anvil cells. These are scientific instruments capable of exerting the same immense pressures found deep within the strata of planets.
The unique ornamental, industrial and scientific applications of diamonds are part of the reason they fetch such high prices. However, it is their relative scarcity which makes them quite so valuable. Though diamonds can be created in laboratories, synthetic diamonds tend to be worth considerably less than their natural counterpart. For that reason, they continue to be mined from the Earth.
The trove of subterranean diamonds discovered by scientists in 2018 represents a value of unimaginable vastness. If ever extracted, the precious gems could transform the world economy in radical and unpredictable ways. For now, however, the discovery had made a rich contribution to our understanding of geological processes.
In many ways, our modern understanding of the Earth and its processes began with the scientific and technological advances of the 1960s and ‘70s. NASA photos of the Earth from outer space popularized the concept of Gaia – that is, the idea of the Earth as a single entity. However, it was the advent of plate tectonics, the theory that the planet’s surface layer or lithosphere consists of shifting plates, that completely transformed our scientific understanding of the world.
Thanks to the theory of plate tectonics, we now understand how mountains and volcanos rise, what causes earthquakes and how continents form, among other natural phenomena. However, our planet still holds untold unsolved mysteries. For example, scientists still don’t know where water came from. And while one theory suggests it arrived on the Earth via ice-covered asteroids, there is no fossil evidence to support it.
Likewise, scientists remain puzzled about what lies at the center of the Earth. Once upon a time, it was believed that the Earth’s core was composed like meteorites, and that they contained an abundance of nickel and iron. Subsequently, however, measurements of the Earth’s gravitational field contradicted that hypothesis. Today, the composition of the Earth’s core remains a mystery.
Finally, one of the most profound unsolved mysteries concerns the origins of life itself. Without any surviving fossil record from that period, scientists don’t know if our most remote, single-celled ancestors emerged from the Earth itself or whether they arrived here on meteors and other interstellar objects. In fact, there is evidence to support both theories.
Source: Absolute History