Researchers have unveil a foreign ornament - sized stone from near the Arctic that ’s scarlet and green and comprised of diamond . Nearly 30,000 colorless micro - diamond , to be exact . Thefindingswere presented this calendar week at the American Geophysical Union descend meeting in San Francisco .
The 30 - mm , 10.5 - gram rock was a sparkly donation to scientific discipline from the owners of Siberia ’s Udachnaya diamond mine , which is dominated by volcanic xenoliths ( Hellenic for “ foreign John Rock ” ) with a few cherished “ diamondiferous ” ones . Among these was a singular diamondiferous xenolith with garnet and olivine to give it those Christmas hues . A team of investigator from the U.S. , Germany , and the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences created 2D and 3D figure of speech of the foreign John Rock using high - declaration X - ray reckon tomography ( which is exchangeable to a medical CT scan ) . These epitome revealed the comparative abundance of its various mineral parts , and diamonds made up 9.5 percent by volume .
The micro - diamonds were between 100 and 700 micrometer gauge in size , and many of them occurred in cluster . With millions of carats per ton , this is the absolute highest yield of diamonds ever in a mantle xenolith , the investigator pen . Typical diamond ore average between 1 to 6 carats per net ton ( a carat is about a one-fifth of a gram ) . But being so petite , these diamond were n’t worth much as jewelry .
" The exciting matter for me is there are 30,000 itty - bitty , staring octahedrons , and not one self-aggrandizing diamond,“Lawrence Taylor from the University of Tennesseesaid at the league . " It ’s like they formed outright . This rock and roll is a strange one indeed . "
Their isotopic atomic number 6 concentration suggests that the diamonds come from pelagic crust that was force deeply inside the Earth with the movements of tectonic plates . They likely crystallize from fluids that fly the coop from subducted crust , Live Science explain .
The chemic reactions that create diamonds are still a bit of an secret , Taylor tells Live Science . scientist cogitate they initiate in the mantle under crushing pressure , then irrupt to the airfoil during explosive volcanic action . The process typically destroys a lot of the mantle rock-and-roll , but this one somehow survive the trip up .
The work will be published inRussian Geology and Geophysicsnext calendar month .
image : Stapanov Alexandervia Wikimedia CC BY - SA 3.0 ( top ) , Larry Taylor via Live Science ( middle )
