Diamonds can be found buried underground.

According to the latest research by American scientists, diamonds may not be as rare as we thought, but are commonly found deep underground.

Ekati, Canada's oldest diamond mine. Photo: Mining

According to UPI, the study, conducted by scientists at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, was published yesterday in the journal Nature. For a long time, scientists have believed that diamonds form in two ways: the oxidation of methane or the reduction of CO2 in lava flows or fluids deep underground. Both require specific geochemical conditions, making diamonds rare and valuable.

However, according to geochemists at Johns Hopkins University, there is another, easier, simpler, and more conventional way to create diamonds. Using chemical models, they demonstrated that diamonds can form when water gradually becomes more acidic as it flows through different layers of Earth's rock.

"The more we learn, the more we discover that diamonds form in a wider variety of rocks," said Dimitri A. Sverjensky, a geochemist at Johns Hopkins University and author of the study. "I think everyone has to admit that more and more diamond-forming environments are being discovered."

However, according to Sverjensky, the fact that diamonds are formed in a simple way does not mean we can mass-produce them in this manner and sell them on the market.

This new formation method requires extremely high pressure and temperature conditions, around 900 to over 1,000 degrees Celsius, conditions that only occur in the deep layers of the Earth's crust. They are only pushed to the surface by volcanic lava. Furthermore, their size is very small, in the micron range (one millionth of a meter), invisible to the naked eye and only observable through a microscope. Therefore, diamonds formed in this way cannot be mined.

Sverjensky's research is significant in helping scientists gain a better understanding of the dynamic flows deep within the Earth—slow-moving currents, a little-understood part of the carbon cycle, the cycle of life on Earth.

According to VnExpress