scientist used sound wave to estimate the composition of the Earth ’s upper mantle and found evidence that around a quadrillion heaps of diamonds may be lay to rest somewhere over 160 kilometer ( 100 miles ) deep beneath our foot .
The enquiry , base on decades of seismal activeness information , was reported in the journal Geochemistry , Geophysics , Geosystems back in 2018 .
Seismographers register the undulation from all the movements within the Earth , such as seism . They are mechanical waves moving at certain speeds depending on the material they go through .
Based on the data , the researchers tried to retrace what the interior of the Earth is like – and that ’s where they trip upon something interesting .
They found certain area in which the seismal waves tend to speed up without account . These region are call “ cratonic etymon ” and are the oldest , most stabile sections of continental tectonic plate . They are sometimes seen as upside - down mess stretching as mysterious as 320 km ( 200 miles ) .
To explicate the seismic data point , the team started playing with the possible composition of these radical . They come at the closing that if these structures check between 1 and 2 percent diamond , then the speed of the seismic Wave makes sense .
This might not seem much in terms of the full amount of material in the crust and mantlepiece , but it is 1,000 times more diamond than expected .
" This show that diamond is not perhaps this exotic mineral , but on the [ geological ] scale of things , it ’s relatively common , " Dr Ulrich Faul , senior generator from MIT , said in astatementin 2018 .
" We ca n’t get at them , but still , there is much more baseball diamond there than we have ever thought before , " Dr Faul followed .
" It ’s circumstantial grounds , but we ’ve pieced it all together , " Faul added . " We went through all the unlike possibilities , from every angle , and this is the only one that ’s left as a reasonable account . "
Diamondsare formed under extremely high - temperature and high - pressure condition found below Earth ’s crust . The reasonthey are rareis that they only get close to the aerofoil in specific eruptions that carve out geological pipe made of a stone call kimberlite . A large concentration of them deeply below the impudence , therefore , is not too bizarre of a hypothesis .
The discipline is published inGeochemistry , Geophysics , Geosystems .
An earlier version of this articlewas publishedin July 2018 .
