• Question: could you super compress the earth in to a massive diamond

    Asked by chipmunk to David on 22 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: David Pyle

      David Pyle answered on 22 Mar 2011:

      Good question – but no! Diamond is made of pure carbon, and the Earth contains many other elements, so if you took the whole Earth and compressed it you’d probably get a mixture of other very dense minerals with carbon included in their structures. Steel, for example, is a dense solid made of Fe, and C – and it’s possible that a lot (perhaps most) of the carbon on Earth is actually dissolved in the Earth’s core in a very dense form of steel.

      If we took all of the Earth’s carbon that’s not in the core and converted it into diamonds, you could cover the surface of the Earth with a layer of diamonds about 400 metres deep..

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