Ultra Rare Diamond Suggests Earth’s Mantle Has an Ocean’s Worth of Water
September 27, 2022 11:43 AM   Subscribe

 
What I love about reading science stories like this is how much other science is buried in them. Like, they know this diamond must have come from 660km+ below the Earth's surface, because of a particular set of minerals it contains. But to reason that out, they already have to know what kinds of minerals exist only hundreds of kilometers below the Earth's surface and at what particular depths. And that's amazing to me -- like, how do we develop that kind of knowledge? It's so neat.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:52 AM on September 27, 2022 [14 favorites]


how do we develop that kind of knowledge?

I AM NOT A SCIENTIST so while I can't speak to the actual steps involved into identifying and discovering this, science is basically a shitton of tiny questions, and each one you answer builds upon the entire corpus of scientific questions and experiments (proven and failed), while the answer also sprouts a whole new crop of tiny little questions, leading to experiments, leading to more knowledge and more questions. And so on and so on. I suspect this one hopped around with chemistry, spectroscopy as a tool from physics to identify elements, and then a little later, a lot of high-pressure physics developed over decades, and even after that, methods of testing by which you won't destroy your sample in this case.

It's gotten a lot more easy to connect disparate fields once computing power and communications took a big leap, especially since Y2K. So now it's not just that each experiment or field has its own tree of further questions and branches, but it's also become now easier to see where certain branches correlate or intertwine. The microbiome of the gut and how it relates to neurology is an exciting example, I think—each field evolved largely separate from one another until a couple decades ago, when a lot of data started becoming generally available, and lab scientists are experts at filling in the missing gaps so they can get authorship on a peer-reviewed paper. This leads to more questions and more experiments from the community. And now we have a whole new wide-open field of investigation into gut macrobiotics + neuroscience.

Anyway, carry on, this article was a fun read and led to some interesting thought exercises.
posted by not_on_display at 12:50 PM on September 27, 2022 [2 favorites]


My understanding is that a lot of this water is trapped in minerals and not liquid. Also the deepest we’ve ever gone into the earth is 12.262 km. The depths this is talking about are unreachable.
posted by interogative mood at 1:22 PM on September 27, 2022 [1 favorite]


Wait for "super deep diamonds" to be the new must-have accessory for the ultra-rich, once they figure out how to use child labor from third world countries to extract them, of course.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 1:25 PM on September 27, 2022 [4 favorites]






*squints*

Needs the kimberlite tag, if only because "kimberlite pipe" sounds like a skateboarding term rather than a geological one.

I was thinking something about this article was familiar, but it wasn't this find I was thinking of -- it was one in Brazil a few years back that was also a ringwoodite inclusion:

The Earth’s Mantle Is Soaking Wet

Tiny diamond impurity reveals water riches of deep Earth (Nature, 2014)
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 2:21 PM on September 27, 2022 [4 favorites]


Yes, the premise sounded familiar to me too but this article does mention and link to the 2014 findings. 2 rocks pointing to the same conclusion is a lot better than 1 rock.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 3:16 PM on September 27, 2022 [1 favorite]


And Stephen Baxter's 2008 novel Flood becomes ever so much more plausible.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 5:26 PM on September 27, 2022 [2 favorites]


Concurrently posted serendipitous AskMeFi question.
posted by fairmettle at 11:30 PM on September 27, 2022


There is water at the bottom of the ocean mantle.
posted by Phanx at 5:13 AM on September 28, 2022 [6 favorites]


Wait for "super deep diamonds" to be the new must-have accessory for the ultra-rich ...

If this should happen, they can easily be faked socially with Herkimer diamonds, which are not at all diamonds but are definitely from Herkimer County, New York. They're cheap and cheerful, and I have some myself; the picture made me think of them.

But I don't think it will. It is amazing, with all our knowledge and equipment, how little we can get into the Earth. The Earth's crust is only about 25 miles deep, less than some Americans' commutes, but to my knowledge we have never come close to the mantle. (My knowledge is not that much, so I could stand corrected, but I would be very, very surprised.)
posted by Countess Elena at 5:58 AM on September 28, 2022


how do we develop that kind of knowledge?

I've always liked this.
posted by tayknight at 7:44 AM on September 28, 2022 [3 favorites]


Countess Elena: We probably could drill into the Mohorovičić discontinuity if we wanted to, that is, if we assigned the resources. Project Mohole aimed to do it in the 60s, and it was largely feasible back then. The crust isn't more than 3-5 miles thick under the oceans, which is only two thirds of the depth of the Kola Superdeep Borehole, and stationkeeping and deep-water drilling technology has improved greatly in the 60 years since Project Mohole was cancelled.

So I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if it got the funding of, a good-sized NASA project, like the JWST ($10B), or even the Perseverance rover (almost $3B), a project to drill to the Moho would be quite feasible (and probably yield pretty good science). It's mostly a matter of wanting to commit the resources, I think.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 5:02 PM on September 29, 2022 [1 favorite]


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