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Asked by 961spcc25 to Camilla, Katie, Mike, Rhys on 24 Jun 2015.
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Rhys Archer answered on 24 Jun 2015:
Partly, it takes very high pressures and very high temperatures to turn rocks into diamonds, the likes of which we only see very deep in our earth.
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Camilla Weiss answered on 24 Jun 2015:
It’s true! How to make a diamond:
– Bury some carbon-containing minerals 100-200 km deep where the pressure reached about 450,000 psi.
– Bake at about 1000 degrees celsius or hotter.
– Leave for, oh I don’t know, a few hundred million years.
– Transport to the Earth’s surface using volcanic magma and leave to cool.
Diamonds are made from carbon which has been squeezed into a really strong and regular crystal lattice. This is usually done deep in the Earth’s surface over hundreds of millions of years – most of the diamonds on Earth are about 1-3 billion years old though as they can take a while to come to the surface – that’s almost 3/4 the age of the Earth! Not everyone has this amount of free time though so you can make diamonds in the lab using a similar process of applying pressure and temperature to carbon containing materials. Did you know some of the diamonds on earth actually come from space? They’re transported here by meteorites. In fact some research shows that the centre of some white dwarfs ( the remains of a star) actually have a giant diamond in their centre. You can also find micro-diamonds at some meteorite impact craters – tiny tiny diamonds formed when the meteorite hit. -
Katie Sparks answered on 24 Jun 2015:
It is a really really long time though
If you look at diamonds, a lot of them are not completely clear – they have a yellowness to them – the colour depends on what other minerals are squashed and heated in with the carbon (the coal bit).
Diamonds are also made from chemicals today, to make sure they are as pure as possible. It is still expensive stuff though!
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