Peanut Butter Into Diamonds…Scientists Discovers.
A team of German scientists has made diamonds from
scratch using none other than plain old peanut butter. The exercise might sound
a little pointless, but it’s helping them understand exactly what the Earth is
made of.
Scientists
at the Bayerisches Geoinstitut in Germany are working on recreating the
conditions of the Earth’s mantle - a thick, rocky layer that sits under the
outer crust almost 3 kilometres below the surface. It’s a pretty important
component for scientists to wrap their heads around, as it constitutes around
85 percent of the total mass and weight of our planet.
Led
by geochemist Dan Frost, the team’s main job is to crush a bunch of rocks at
the highest pressures possible to determine the exact composition of the
biggest structural component of our planet. While it’s been assumed that the
Earth’s mantle was made from materials that were flung about by the asteroid
belt - the same materials that make up a meteorite - previous
analyses have found that the mantle contains significantly less silicon than
meteorite material.
It’s Frost’s mission to figure out where all that silicon
went.
To
produce the pressure needed to mimic what’s going on deep inside the Earth,
Frost’s team uses two types of presses. "The first uses a powerful piston
to squeeze tiny samples of crystals at up to 280,000 times atmospheric
pressure, as they are simultaneously cooked by a furnace,” says David Robinson at BBC Future.
“That recreates the
conditions in the top layers of the lower mantle at around 800 or 90 km (500 to
562 miles) below the Earth’s surface, causing the atoms of the crystal to
rearrange into denser structures.”
These
minerals are then crushed even further under the pressure of an anvil made from
two tiny diamonds. This allows the the team to recreate what a mineral would
look like all the way down in the deepest parts of the lower mantle layer.
The
pressure exerted by the minuscule diamonds is about 1.3 million times that of
Earth’s atmospheric pressure. And here’s the genius part - Frost explains that while the minerals are still
crushed inside the anvil, he takes measurements of howsound waves are travelling through them and compares
this to how seismic wavestravel through the layers of the Earth whenever
there’s an earthquake or volcano eruption to figure out if their composition is
the same.
According to Robinson, the results of Frost’s experiment
have revealed that, as suspected, there isn’t enough silicon in the mantle
materials to match meteorite material.
It could be that it’s sunk right through
the mantle, even as far down as the inner core, or maybe all the silicon went
the other way and ended up in the very young Earth’s crust, only to be blasted
free by impacting meteorites. That's what Frost and his team have to figure out
next.
One
of the more peculiar results of Frost's research was the discovery that you can
make diamonds using plain old peanut butter. How does something like that
even happen?
Another part of his research is to investigate how certain
geological processes could have stripped carbon dioxide out of the Earth’s oceans and deposited
it into its rocks, which were then pushed down into the mantle over billions of
years and transformed into diamonds. But the problem with testing this theory
is the sheer difficulty of creating a diamond from scratch in the lab. Robinson explains at BBC Future:
"Frost is hardly likely to make a fortune
from his harvest; the diamonds take an agonisingly long time to grow. ‘If we
wanted a two-or-three-millimetre diamond, we would need to leave it for weeks,'
he says. That hasn’t stopped him experimenting with other sources for his
diamond maker, however; at the behest of a German TV station, he attempted to
create some diamonds from carbon-rich peanut butter. 'A lot of hydrogen was released that destroyed the experiment,'
he says, 'but only after it had been converted to diamond.'
Sounds
pretty inconvenient to us, so we'd be happy to take all that carbon-rich peanut
butter off his hands...
VIA - BBC Future
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