The difference between gold and diamonds

Diamonds are forever and gold is precious, but which one is rarer? And does this rarity have anything to do with the price we see in jewelry stores?

Obviously, the answer is not as easy as you think.

“Gold is a heavy metal, a rare earth element, formed in collisions of neutron stars,” says Earth scientist and MIT professor Ulrich Faul.

“During the formation of the Earth, heavier elements were attracted towards the Earth's core, which means that near the Earth's crust it is difficult to find the heavier elements near the Earth's crust," says Yana Fedortchouk, professor of Earth sciences and associate director of the Experimental Hyperbaric Geological Research Laboratory at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Finding large quantities of gold.

You can find it even in low concentrations. It's present in a wide variety of rocks in the crust, Fedorchuk told Live Science, "but in order to create a reservoir, it needs to reach some concentrations to make mining economically viable."

According to Fedorchuk, the average concentration of gold in the Earth's crust is "very, very low", about 4 parts per billion.

She added that in order to produce any concentration of gold that could have a market value, the stored gold would have to be more than 1,250 times concentrated.

On the other hand, diamonds are formed under high pressure from a very common element, carbon.

In its uncompressed form, it is known as graphite, which is the material found in pencils.

Compared to gold, the average carbon concentration in the Earth's crust is about 200,000 parts per billion.

According to the book (Elsevier Science Ltd., 1978) written by geologist William Fyfe: "The importance of fluids lies in metamorphic, tectonic, and chemical transport processes."

Therefore, the rarity of diamonds has nothing to do with its elemental composition. Rather, the conversion of natural carbon into diamonds that can be manufactured is a very laborious and rarely successful process.

Diamonds can form in the Earth's mantle, somehow can be mined to the surface, or they can form during a meteorite impact, but those diamonds are never gemstones and are very small in size, Fedorchuk said.

The mantle is the layer under the Earth's crust.

Diamonds form deep in the Earth's mantle and can be extracted from deep sediments or those pushed up through slow rock uplift during the mountain-forming process.

However, during a period of slow rise - metamorphism to graphite - diamond turns into graphite, which makes it almost never possible to rise to the surface like gemstones.

The formula required to form diamonds depends on depth, temperature and pressure. Carbon is buried at least 150 kilometers below the Earth's surface and then heated to about 1,204 degrees Celsius, under roughly 725,000 pounds of pressure per square inch (5 billion Pa).

It is quickly brought to the surface by a volcanic eruption to cool.

This exceptional process makes natural combustible diamonds even rarer than gold, Fedorchuk said.

"But in its primitive form, gold is much rarer than diamond," Faul told Live Science.

With all this, carbon is one of the most abundant elements on Earth, especially when compared to heavy metals such as gold, and simply diamonds are made of carbon placed under tremendous pressure.

The invention of synthetic diamonds complicates the issue more than it is complicated.

Scientists can recreate the conditions that are necessary to provide for the transformation of graphite into diamond in the laboratory, so that a volcanic eruption does not have to occur, but at the same time it is not possible to apply this to gold, the ancient chemistry is still poor unfortunately!

Although manufactured diamonds have the same natural formations, they are usually sold 30% cheaper than natural diamonds in the market, and this is because they are considered to be of low value.

But does the mere presence of lab-made diamonds make the gem more popular than we expected? Voll insists on this fact, saying: "Diamonds in the case that are less than a certain size are not worth mining in the first place."

Who wants to buy a diamond that needs a magnifying glass to be visible?

Gold is more abundant than large size diamonds, but with diamonds being a part of the material it is not particularly rare.