German Scientist Makes Diamonds Out of Peanut Butter

The BBC reported that Dan Frost, a scientist at Germany’s Bayerisches Geoinstitut, is working on mimicking the conditions of the Earth’s lower mantle. In doing so, he’s found some interesting ways to make diamonds — for instance, from peanut butter.

As quoted in the market news:

[Frost] suspects that a series of geological processes could pull CO2 out of the oceans, into rocks and then down into the mantle, where it is converted into diamonds. These gem stones are less volatile than other forms of carbon, says Frost, meaning that it is less likely to be released back into the atmosphere. A diamond-studded mantle could have therefore have slowed down the warming of the Earth, potentially helping the evolution of life.

The key ingredient for this to happen, he thinks, is iron. The high pressures of the mantle force carbon dioxide from the rocks into the iron-rich minerals, which strip away oxygen, leaving the carbon to form a diamond. And that is exactly what Frost found when he recreated the process using his presses – essentially forging a diamond from thin air.

Frost is hardly likely to make a fortune from his harvest; the diamonds take an agonisingly long time to grow. ‘If we wanted a two-or-three-millimetre diamond, we would need to leave it for weeks,’ he says. That hasn’t stopped him experimenting with other sources for his diamond maker, however; at the behest of a German TV station, he attempted to create some diamonds from carbon-rich peanut butter. ‘A lot of hydrogen was released that destroyed the experiment,’ he says, ‘but only after it had been converted to diamond.’

Click here to read the full BBC report.