Recent research published in Nature Geoscience and quoted by Silence Alert shows that a diamond recently unearthed in a Botswana diamond mine was formed in an environment rich in water.
The diamond is full of minerals that suggest the diamond formed 660 kilometers below Earth’s surface – in a divide between the upper and lower mantle called the transition zone – is rich in water.
“The occurrence of ringwoodite together with the hydrous phases indicate a wet environment at this boundary,” write a team of researchers led by mineral physicist Tingting Gu of the Gemological Institute of New York and Purdue University.
According to Gu and her colleagues, “although the formation of upper-mantle diamonds is often associated with the presence of fluids, super-deep diamonds with similar retrogressed mineral assemblages rarely have been observed accompanied with hydrous minerals.”
Read the full article here.
