Jakarta –
In the twilight of the Cretaceous Period, 86 million years ago, volcanic fissures in what is now South Africa rumbled. Beneath the surface, magma from hundreds of kilometers away shoots upwards, crushing rocks and minerals and bringing them to the surface in reverse avalanches.
Quoted from Live Science, Wednesday (17/1/2024) in 1869, the discovery of a large, shiny stone by a shepherd on the bank of a nearby river made this simple landscape famous.
The stone was a giant diamond that became known as the Star of Africa, and the white hills hid the Kimberley Mines which later became the center of diamond hunting in South Africa, and perhaps the largest hole on Earth ever dug by human hands.
Thanks to the Kimberley Mine, also often called The Big Hole, the formation where the diamonds were found is now known as kimberlite. This formation is distributed throughout the world, from Ukraine to Siberia to Western Australia, but is relatively small in number and rare.
These locations are special, because their magma originates from the deepest depths of the Earth, from beneath the continental floors at the boundaries of the hot convective mantle. Some may originate from the transition area between the upper and lower mantle.
Thus, this magma enters very deep and very ancient rocks, and interacts with other processes that only occur in the depths of the Earth, namely the formation of diamonds.
Researchers have long known that when tectonic plates rub against each other, they drag carbon from the surface to depths where it can crystallize into diamonds.
Now, they are starting to realize that what goes down must (sometimes) come back up, and that the reappearance of this carbon, now compressed into sparkling gems, is also linked to the movement of tectonic plates. In particular, diamonds appear to erupt when supercontinents break apart.
“Even though the processes are different, diamonds and kimberlite together can tell us about the life cycles of supercontinents,” said Suzette Timmerman, a geologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland who studies diamonds.
Next: When the Diamond Fountain Gushed Out of the Earth
(rns/fay)
2024-01-17 06:16:40
#burst #diamonds #center #earth #continents #broke
