The Rarest Diamond in the World: How the Split of the Supercontinent Created the Pink Diamond

Jakarta –

This is the rarest diamond in the world. Its formation was due to the split of the supercontinent.

Diamond it is a 90 percent pink diamond found in the Argyle diamond mine in Western Australia. Most diamonds from the Argyl mine are brown or tawny. But out of a thousand gems, a pair of rare and precious pink gems appeared.

The pink color is created from more pressure than necessary. All diamonds are created from pressure and more pressure creates diamonds of various colors.

“They (diamonds) are actually damaged diamonds,” said Hugo Olierook, a geoscientist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia.

In the journal Nature Communications, Dr Olierook and his team report that 1.3 million years ago, brown and reddish rocks appeared on the relatively thin continental margin during the breakup of the Nuna supercontinent.

Long before that, when land masses collided to form Nuna, a collision on the northwestern edge of Australia exerted pressure that colored the gem into a colored diamond.

As Nuna began to break apart, the geological layers where the continents previously collided thinned out. This thinning helped diamond-rich magma rise to the surface near the northwestern edge of Australia

This is supported by recent research which says that the breakup of the supercontinent triggered a vortex in the Earth’s mantle that caused a diamond-filled eruption to penetrate the Earth’s crust.

“This new study is an important step in deciphering the rift conditions that helped create the colorful gems at Argyle,” said Thomas Gernon, a geologist at the University of Southampton in England, as reported by detikINET from The New York Times, Monday (2/10/2023 )

However, further research still needs to be done. As Dr Gernon said, understanding an ancient system like this is not an easy endeavor.

“Nature always has surprises,” he said.

*This article was written by Khalisha Fitri, a participant in the Merdeka Campus Certified Internship Program at detikcom.

Watch the Video “Discovery of Rare Pink Diamonds in Angola”

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2023-10-02 14:10:34
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