How long diamond to form

A tiny diamond is still preferable to a synthetic diamond if its true beauty is what you are really after. In order to ensure that you are in fact purchasing a real diamond, that indeed took millions or billions of years to form, it is highly recommend to have the stone assessed by an expert and to only buy from trustworthy establishments. Unless you are willing to shell out quite a bit, understand that forming from carbon and enduring a rough journey to the surface often involves some sort of flaws and inclusions.

The more you pay the cleaner your diamond will be. All you have to do is do the research, shop in the right places, and come with as much knowledge as possible. Diamond Blog. Marking up the rough stones The Natural Diamond Process In order to understand how a diamond is made; we must differentiate between a completely natural diamond and any of its many impostors. Sizing a rough pink diamond Synthetic Diamonds While the recipe for natural diamonds may be quite complex and time consuming to say the least, creating synthetic diamonds is a lot simpler.

Authentic Vs. Synthetic Diamonds Yes, real diamonds take an extremely long time to form. As you already know, diamonds are quite the phenomenon, but how long does it actually take for them to grow? Well, let's start with the different processes under which they are created and what diamonds are made from.

Naturally mined diamonds are the product of high heat and pressure known as HPHT or high pressure, high temperature. It all begins miles below the surface of the earth in the upper mantle, an incubator for magma of 2, degrees Fahrenheit.

A speed that creates pressure proportional to 25, pounds per square inch is exerted. As the volcanic material moves quickly, it cools down taking only a matter of hours whereby carbon atoms in close vicinity get locked together to form a diamond structure. It is this quick movement of volcanic material that allows for cooling down, reduces heat energy to stop the newly-formed diamond structure from being rearranged and turning into graphite.

That's why a diamond is such a hard material because you have each carbon atom participating in four of these very strong covalent bonds that form between carbon atoms. So as a result you get this hard material. Again where the carbon is coming from, how quickly they're growing, those are all still open questions, but obviously the conditions are such that you've got some group of carbon atoms that are in close enough proximity that they start to bond. As other carbon atoms move into the vicinity they will attach on.

That's the way any crystal grows. It's the process of atoms locking into place that produces this repeating network, this structure of carbon atoms, that eventually grows large enough that it produces crystals that we can see. Each of these crystals, each diamond, one carat diamond, represents literally billions and billions of carbon atoms that all had to lock into place to form this very orderly crystalline structure. You mentioned that scientists don't know where the carbon comes from.

What are some possible sources? In some cases, the carbon seems to have originated within the mantle of the Earth, so carbon that was already in the Earth. In other cases, there's evidence very curiously to suggest that the carbon may have originated near the surface of the Earth.

The thinking there is that this carbon could have literally been carbon that was part of carbonate sediments or animals, plants, shells, whatever, that was carried down into the upper mantle of the Earth by the plate tectonics mechanism called subduction. We really don't know how long it takes. There have been attempts to try to date inclusions in different parts of diamonds, and those have largely been unsuccessful. It may be that diamonds form over periods as short a time as days, weeks, months to millions of years.

Typically, as with many crystals that grow on the Earth, it's not a continuous process. The diamonds may start to grow and then there may be an interruption for some reason — a change in conditions, temperature, pressure, source of carbon, whatever—and they could sit for millions, hundreds of million of years, and then start growing again.

That's part of the problem of trying to put some sort of a growth period on them; things don't always occur continuously in the Earth. We can grow diamonds in the lab and we can simulate conditions there. But there are things we have to do to grow diamonds in the laboratory that aren't obvious as to how it happens in the Earth. In the laboratory, they're typically grown, but there's some catalyst.