Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Bogabam Here. If you've ever heard the slogan a diamond is Forever, then a nineteen forties marketing campaign is still doing its job. The line was coined by an ad woman working with the agency that was with de Beers Group. They're the company credited with almost single handedly popularizing diamonds and engagement rings from the late nineteen forties onwards. Yep, that trend isn't even a century old.
De Beers spent decades building a global empire, and some would call it a cartel around diamond mines that they owned in countries like South Africa. So why did they purchase more than three thousand square miles and that's about seven thousand, eight hundred square kilometers of Atlantic seafloor near the coast of Namibia. It's simple. Not all diamonds are found on dry land. Many turn up and sediments below the ocean's surface. You just have to know where to look.
Carbon is a wonderfully versatile element found in Earth's crust, atmosphere, and all living things that we know of anyway. It's also well represented in jewelry stores. Diamonds are made of carbon atoms that have been subjected to extremely high temperatures and pressures. The crystals usually have eight sides before being cut, but six and twelve sided specimens are out there too. Inside a diamond, every individual carbon atom shares a strong
bond with four others, which makes diamonds ridiculously hard. Rub one of these gems against almost any other known material and it'll leave a scratch mark behind. Asteroids can create the intense heat and pressure needed to produce diamonds when they strike the face of our planet. Such impact diamonds are pretty rare, though, and they tend to be small. You're way more likely to find a diamond from deep within the Earth, forged somewhere in the ballpark of five
hundred miles under the surface. That's around a hundred forty d kilometers, and the ocean may have played an underappreciated role in the history of our world's diamonds supply as well. Many diamonds contain small quantities of salt. For years, geologists wondered if this originally came from sea water. A study published in the journal Science Advances in twenty nineteen bolstered
this hypothesis. It turns out that when a blend of marine sediments and the volcanic rock peridotite experience high heat and tremendous pressure in a laboratory setting, you get something that looks an awful lot like the salts trapped inside
some diamonds. What's this mean for the real world, though, According to the papers authors, their experiment suggests that most diamonds come into being after chunks of seafloor are dragged into Earth's mantle via plate tectonics, and some of the minerals taken from the ocean during this process crystallize into gems. Volcanic eruptions later bring the diamonds up to the planet's
surface or pretty close to it. And now, the study mentioned above doesn't explain whide Biers and other groups are hunting for diamonds off the African coast, those stones who are more likely carried out to sea by river currents. Namibia's southern border is defined by the Mighty Orange River. For millions of years, it's been grabbing a hold of diamonds from mainland deposits and relocating them elsewhere on the continent. Only sometimes this river ferries the stones all the way
out to the ocean. Since the nineteen sixties, treasure seekers have been dredging up diamonds by the coast lines of northwestern South Africa and southern Namibia. In twenty eighteen, nearly seventy five percent of the latter countries total diamond output came from ocean based mining operations. Most of these gems are harvested at depths of four hundred two four hundred and fifty feet that's about a hundred and twenty two
hundred and forty meters below sea level. To accomplish this, sediments from the ocean floor are sucked up into a remote controlled crawler vehicle that scuttles across the sea bed. Fitted with mechanical arm it sends diamond ladden payloads to the main vessel up above, where machines separate out the crystals. Drones and two person submarines have both been used to
help these ships find diamond rich areas beneath the waves. Unfortunately, though, dredging campaigns can have long term consequences for aquatic wildlife. As a cologist Kirsten Thompson told CNN, in the waters off the coast of Namibia are an important area for a high diversity of resident and migratory species such as sharks, whales, dolphins, and seals. Marine mining removes part of the seabed with heavy machinery and habitat. Recovery from this type of disturbance
can take decades. Gathering these ocean diamonds by hand with higher divers in small boats is another option that's been executed in recent years. Today's episode is based on the article are there Diamonds in the Ocean on how stuff works dot com written by mar Mancini. Brain Stuff is production of I heart Radio in partnership with how stuffworks
dot Com, and it's produced by Tyler Klang. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.