Black diamonds found in only a few places on Earth may have crashed down from space in a kilometre-sized rock, according to new research. The diamonds, also called carbonado, are only found in Brazil and the Central African Republic. Unlike other diamonds, they are made of millions of diamond crystals that are stuck together. They are also porous, which is a puzzle. Scientists say it would have been difficult for gas to become trapped in rocks at depths of about 200 kilometres below the Earth's surface. The intense pressure there turns carbon into conventional diamonds. "This is the feature that first led some of us to think, well, perhaps there has to be a different alternative," says Stephen Haggerty, a geologist at Florida International University in Miami, US, and an author of the new study. Because carbonado diamonds have only been found in two places and never in traditional diamond fields, some scientists suspected they crashed to Earth from space. Haggerty believes they came from a large, diamond-bearing asteroid that may have fallen to Earth billions of years ago, when the planet and the Moon were being heavily bombarded by space rocks. Carbonado has been dated to be between 2.6 billion and 3.8 billion years old. For the full article Click Here


DA Morgan