Ultra Rare Diamond Suggests Earth’s Mantle Has an Ocean’s Worth of Water
A beautiful blue flaw in a gem-quality diamond from Botswana is actually a tiny fragment of Earth’s deep interior—and it suggests our planet’s mantle contains oceans’ worth of water. The flaw, technically called an inclusion, looks like a fish eye: a deep blue center surrounded by a white haze. But it’s really a pocket of the mineral ringwoodite from 660 kilometers down, at the boundary between the upper and lower mantle.
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