The Cullinan mine, located on a diamond-bearing kimberlite pipe in the Gauteng Province of South Africa, is the world’s richest source of rare blue diamonds and has produced more than a quarter of the ...

Deep below the surface of our world, far beyond our feeble reach, enigmatic processes grind and roil. Every now and then, the Earth disgorges clues to their nature: tiny chthonic diamonds encasing ...

The Cullinan mine, located on a diamond-bearing kimberlite pipe in the Gauteng province of South Africa, is the world’s richest source of rare blue diamonds and has produced more than a quarter of the ...

There may be more than a quadrillion tons of diamond hidden in the Earth’s interior, according to a new study from MIT and other universities. But the new results are unlikely to set off a diamond ...

It sounds a bit weird to say, considering we've all lived our entire lives on this planet, but scientists still only have a pretty basic understanding of the inner workings of Earth. We know the ...

A pair of diamonds that formed hundreds of kilometers deep in Earth’s malleable mantle both contain specks of materials that form in completely opposing chemical environments—a combination so unusual ...

The diamond provides "fundamental proof" of the long-theorized idea that slabs of oceanic crust that sink deep within the Earth are recycled into the lower mantle, researchers said. A study of the ...

Diamonds are not exactly as rare as you may think. New research suggests that they can form through a previously unknown reaction, and they may be widespread in the rocks far beneath our feet.

This cartoon shows a subducting oceanic plate traveling like a conveyor belt from the surface down to the lower mantle. The white arrows show the comparatively well-established shallow recycling ...

Millions of years ago, precious gem stones from the heart of southern Africa washed westward along the Orange River and emptied into the Atlantic Ocean. While some swept up on the beaches along the ...

Diamonds that formed deep in the Earth's mantle contain evidence of chemical reactions that occurred on the seafloor. Probing these gems can help geoscientists understand how material is exchanged ...