14 DAY TRIAL // There are black swans, black storks, but did you know there are ... black diamonds!?
To add more to the mystery of this extremely rare gem, geologists have found they came from the interstellar space. Jozsef Garai and Stephen Haggerty of Florida International University, along with Case Western Reserve University researchers Sandeep Rekhi and Mark Chance, sustain the extraterrestrial origin for the unique black or "carbonado" diamonds.
Haggerty and Garai analyzed the hydrogen content in black diamond samples using infrared-detection instruments at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and discovered that the quantity indicated that the mineral formed in a supernova explosion. "Trace elements critical to an 'ET' origin are nitrogen and hydrogen", said Haggerty. "The presence of hydrogen in the carbonado diamonds indicates an origin in a hydrogen-rich interstellar space". "Carbonado" means in the Portuguese spoken in Brazil "carbonized, burnt"; it refers to the visual similarity to porous charcoal.
Black diamonds are found only in certain geologic formations in Brazil and the Central African Republic. Haggerty believes that black diamonds might have rained down on Earth inside meteorites billions of years ago. "Their relative distribution on Earth could be explained by the timing of the formation of the continents", he said. Common diamonds emerge hundreds of miles beneath the Earth's surface, where high pressure and heat turn carbons into diamonds.
Volcanic explosions send the gems in a short amount of time to the surface where they can be mined. "Conventional diamonds are mined from explosive volcanic rocks [kimberlites] that transport them from depths in excess of 100 kilometers to the Earth's surface in a very short amount of time," said Sonia Esperanca, program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research. "This process preserves the unique crystal structure that makes diamonds the hardest natural material known."
"From Australia to Siberia, from China to India, the geological settings of conventional diamonds are virtually identical", said Haggerty. About 600 tons of conventional diamonds have been mined, traded, polished and adorned since 1900. "But not a single black diamond has been discovered in the world's mining fields", Haggerty said.