Scientists Just Found A Quadrillion Tons Worth Of Diamonds
The total value estimate is more than 150-septillion dollars, and the estimated weight of all the diamonds comes to one-quadrillion tons.
By DAVID on July 17, 2018
I’m not sure how the math works on that, so let’s leave it to Metro UK to figure out. They say that one quadrillion tons of diamonds is worth roughly $150,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That’s 150 Septillion dollars (24 zeros). I’d be happy with just 1-septillion dollars, I could handle that I think.
Scientists made the discovery by using sound. Weird as that sounds (hah, pun), it’s the same sort of sound used in sonar imagery. When there’s an earthquake, all sorts of “waves” travel through the earth – sound, motion, ultrasonic, etc. You sense the waves with a seismograph, like those used for detecting earthquakes. When you have enough of these waves, you can actually “draw” a picture of what the inside of the earth looks like – geology. The scientists say that below the earth’s crust, there are areas called “cratonic roots.” Those are the most original parts of the earth’s crust, they’ve been there the longest. The rest of the tectonic plates sort of move around on top of those roots.
Anyway, scientists think that those cratonic roots are made up of about 1-2% diamond. “Considering the total volume of cratonic roots in the Earth, the team figures that about a quadrillion (1016) tons of diamond are scattered within these ancient rocks,” the research says. So why aren’t we going to get them? Well, besides absolutely obliterating the earth’s economy, they’re about 90 or more miles beneath the crust. “So just drill a hole,” right? Well, the deepest man-made hole on earth is the Kola Superdeep Borehole. They started in 1970, and it took over 20 years to drill a 9-inch hole about 7.5 miles down. They stopped in 1992 when temperatures in the hole grew to more than 350 degrees. So, yeah. Check out the research here.
