The Remarkable Discovery of Diamonds from a Waste Pile.
Researchers from Queensland University of Technology have used a piece of rock from a diamond mine waste pile and a standard laptop to solve a long-standing geological puzzle about diamond formation in the Earth’s ancient continents. The study involved computer modeling on a rock from the African continent recovered from the bottom of the lithosphere, the outer part of the Earth between about 30km and 250km below the surface. The research challenges the existing two-step shallow “melting and stacking” explanation and suggests that diamonds are rare today – and were in fact always rare.