Diamonds form deep in the earth’s crust, about 93 miles or 150 kilometers underground and rise to the surface in eruptions called kimberlite. Photo/Learning Geology
LONDON – The researchers English have discovered patterns where diamonds emerge from the Earth’s surface as a result of the supercontinent breaking apart. Usually the breakup of super continents triggers large and explosive volcanic eruptions.
Thomas Gernon, a professor of earth and climate sciences at the University of Southampton in England, explains that diamond formed deep in the earth’s crust, some 93 miles or 150 kilometers underground. Diamonds rise to the surface very quickly in eruptions which are called kimberlites.
“This kimberlite moves at speeds between 18 and 133 km/hour. Some eruptions may have created gas and dust explosions like Mount Vesuvius,” said Thomas Gernon, quoted by SINDOnews from the Live Science page, Thursday (24/8/2023).
Gernon said kimberlite most often occurs when tectonic plates rearrange themselves massively, such as when the supercontinent Pangea broke up. Oddly enough, kimberlites often erupt in the middle of continents and the inner crust is thick, hard, and difficult to break.
“Diamonds have been at the bottom of continents for hundreds of millions or even billions of years. There must have been a sudden stimulus, because this eruption itself was very strong, very explosive,” said Gernon.
Gernon and his colleagues started by looking for a correlation between the age of the kimberlite and the degree of plate fragmentation that occurred at that time. They found that over the last 500 million years, there was a pattern in which the plates started to break apart, then 22 million to 30 million years later, the kimberlite eruption peaked.
This pattern has also held for the last 1 billion years, but with greater uncertainty given the difficulty of tracing geological cycles. For example, researchers found that kimberlite eruptions occurred in what is now Africa and South America, beginning about 25 million years after the breakup of the southern supercontinent Gondwana, about 180 million years ago.
2023-08-24 14:35:39
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