subject: Diamonds - Are they natural or man made? [print this page] In this articles we're going to cover what diamonds are made from and also the actual manufacturing of diamonds. Yes, we have reached the point in which we can really make a diamond. Isn't technology excellent?
So what specifically are diamonds manufactured from and how do they turn out to be diamonds?
Nicely, believe it or not, diamonds are made from exactly the same substance that the lead in your pencil and coal is made of. It's just that the atoms themselves are arranged inside a way that make them tighter than any other substance. The bonds are formed when carbon exists at incredibly higher temperatures and under very higher stress. Normal diamonds are built extremely deep inside Earth about 180 km below the surface wherever high temperatures and pressure exist naturally. Below the earth's crust is the mantel, which is made up of molten rock, metals and other materials.
The temperature is extremely large at this depth - between 1100 degrees Celsius and 1400 degrees Celsius. The large pressures are created by the weight of 180 km of rocks pressing down on it. This is how the diamond comes to be. Besides the carbon there are other substances like nitrogen and sulphur that may come to be trapped in the crystal. These substances can add color to the diamond, which below normal conditions is colorless. 1 on the rarest diamond colors is pink, which just happens to be the color in the diamond that Ben Afleck gave to Jennifer Lopez. It's worth is about $3 million.
The question numerous folks ask is, wherever exactly does the carbon come from to create these diamonds? Well, some with the carbon comes through the mantel with the Earth since the time it was formed, but some of it also comes through the bodies and shells of micro-organisms like algae in ancient oceans. This organic carbon was buried in rocks that had been dragged down into the mantle because of plate tectonics and continental drift. The fact with the matter is, all life forms on Earth are carbon based, so technically if we were to fall into the ocean near a tectonic plate in which rocks had been being dragged underneath we could, inside a million years or so, come back as a diamond. So, if that's how diamonds are produced then how is it feasible to create diamonds artificially?
Well, producing a material that's harder than a organic diamond has in fact been a goal of scientists for a quite long time and in 2004, a group of scientists at the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, DC produced gem sized diamonds that are harder than any other crystals. These diamonds have been produced from a gas mixture at a rate that's 100 times faster than any other strategy that has been utilised to date. The crystals ended up so difficult that they really broke the equipment utilized and had been created in less than a day.
The crystals were definitely grown using a special substantial growth-rate chemical vapor deposition (CVD) process that they developed. They then subjected the crystals to a high pressure, higher temperature treatment to further harden the crystals. The way the procedure works is like this. Hydrogen and methane gas are bombarded with charged particles, or plasma, in a chamber. The plasma produces a chemical reaction that results in "carbon rain," that falls on a seed inside the chamber. After this rain hits the seed the carbon atoms arrange themselves in the same structure as the seed. By employing this strategy they have grown diamonds up to 10 millimeters across and 4.5 millimeters in thickness.
Should you ever saw the Superman episode where they needed to discover a diamond to replace the one lost in the idol, you saw that it needed placing carbon below a thousand tons of pressure for a million years. Superman of course squeezed the carbon in his hand and in seconds had a diamond.
It seems we're not too far away from that now.
Diamonds - Are they natural or man made?
By: Sam Tylor
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