If only Marilyn Monroe were around to see this ... a red and green ornament-sized rock bursting with 30,000 diamonds. Hello, new best friend.
The rock was found in Russia's Udachnaya diamond mine, but because the diamonds are so small, they are worthless as gems. Science lucked out, according to Live Science.
"The exciting thing for me is there are 30,000 itty-bitty, perfect octahedrons, and not one big diamond," said Larry Taylor, a geologist at the University of Tennessee. "It's like they formed instantaneously."
The number of diamonds and their interesting colors will shed some sparkling light on geologic history. "The associations of minerals will tell us something about the genesis of this rock, which is a strange one indeed," Taylor said.
Scientists believe that diamonds are created in the space between the Earth's crust and core (the mantle). Chunks of diamond-carrying mantle are expelled to the surface by volcanic eruptions. Most of the mantle rock would be destroyed during the ride, which leaves crystals glimmering on the surface, but the rock found at Udachnaya somehow survived the speedy ride.
Taylor, along with researchers at the Russian Academy of Sciences, are studying the Udachnaya diamonds. The rock was probed by an industrial x-ray tomography scanner (like a medical CT scanner, but more intense), according to Live Science. This causes the mineral to glow in different colors while the diamonds appear black.
Inclusions (those black holes your jeweler looks for through the loop, the glass used to look at a diamond), also tell scientists about where and how the rock was formed. Researchers used electron beams to identify the chemicals trapped in the spaces. They found carbonate, a common mineral present in limestone and seashells, and garnet.
The findings suggest the diamonds were formed by liquids from the subducted oceanic crust, made of a thick rock called peridotite, according to Live Science. Subduction occurs when one tectonic plate falls to pieces beneath another.
The results of the scientists' work on the diamonds will be published in a special issue of Russian Geology and Geophysics in January 2015.
