A diamond contains the only known sample of a mineral from Earth’s mantle—and hints at oceans’ worth of water hidden deep within our planet
A beautiful blue flaw in a gem-quality diamond from Botswana is actually a tiny fragment of Earth’s deep interior—and it suggests our planet’s mantle contains oceans’ worth of water.
“It is incredibly rare to even have a super deep diamond, and then to have inclusions is even rarer,” says Suzette Timmerman, a mantle geochemist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta, who was not involved in the new discovery. Finding a ringwoodite inclusion is even more mind-boggling, she says.
The stunning bit of diamond-encased mantle was discovered by Tingting Gu, a mineral physicist now at Purdue University, who was at the time doing research at the Gemological Institute of America. Her job was to study rare inclusions found in diamonds. Inclusions are undesirable for jewelry because they cloud a diamond’s sparkle. But they’re often interesting to scientists because they trap bits of the environment where the diamond formed millennia earlier.
That’s an important depth because it happens to be the boundary between mantle layers—where seismic waves moving through Earth’s interior mysteriously change speeds. Ringwoodite holds water better than ferropericlase and enstatite, so the mineral probably releases a lot of water as it undergoes changes at this boundary. The change in minerals and the possible water release could explain why the seismic waves travel differently through this region.
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