Scientists just unearthed a quadrillion tonnes of diamonds buried in the ground

Unfortunately, the diamonds are buried so deep we’ll probably never mine them (Getty)

If you’ve ever saved up to buy diamond jewellery, we have some slightly disheartening news – scientists might have just found a quadrillion tonnes of diamond here on Earth.

Researchers reckon there’s a quadrillion tonnes of diamond buried in the ‘cratonic roots’ in continents.

That’s 1,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes – and with diamond retailing at £3,000-plus a carat, it’s quite a hoard.

There’s just one, tiny, catch: the treasure trove is buried 100 miles down, deeper than any drill has ever penetrated, according to MIT researchers.

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Cratonic roots are the most ancient sections of rock under tectonic plates, shaped like upside-down mountains.

The researchers estimate that the roots may have 1-2% diamond, meaning that about a quadrillion tons of diamond are buried there.

Given that a ton of diamond is 50,000,000 carats, worth at least £3,000 each, that comes out at a tasty £150,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

‘This shows that diamond is not perhaps this exotic mineral, but on the [geological] scale of things, it’s relatively common,’ says Ulrich Faul, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.

‘We can’t get at them, but still, there is much more diamond there than we have ever thought before.’

The researchers concluded that there were diamonds down there due to an anomaly in seismic data – where sound waves seemed to speed up.

Faul and his colleagues calculated that the anomaly could be caused by 1%-2% of diamonds in the ‘cratonic roots.’

Faul said, ‘Diamond in many ways is special. One of its special properties is, the sound velocity in diamond is more than twice as fast as in the dominant mineral in upper mantle rocks, olivine.’