Dan Frost at the Bayerisches Geoinstitut in Germany was finding interesting ways to make diamonds and so he was trying to simulate the high temperature and high pressure conditions in the Earth’s lower mantle.
Frost’s research started with a theory that in the Earth’s beginning, rocks could have pulled carbon dioxide from oceans. Then, while the rocks were drawn deeper and deeper into the Earth’s mantle, the high pressures squeezed the carbon dioxide out of the rocks. Once the carbon dioxide was free, iron in the mantle squeezed the oxygen out of it, leaving just pure carbon. Then, the pure carbon was squished into a diamond by the high heat, or, at least, that’s what Frost wanted to test.
While they may look beautiful, diamonds are actually made of simple carbon atoms arranged into a crystal. Carbon atoms are found in every single living thing and every type of food we eat, which made it possible for everyone’s favourite sandwich ingredient to become a diamond!
Using special presses, Frost recreated this situation with peanut butter instead of rocks. The first press uses “a powerful piston to squeeze tiny samples of crystals at up to 280,000 times atmospheric pressure, as they are simultaneously cooked by a furnace,†said David Robinson at BBC Future.
“That recreates the conditions in the top layers of the lower mantle at around 800 or 900 km (500 to 562 miles) below the Earth’s surface, causing the atoms of the crystal to rearrange.â€
However, the hydrogen that is bonded to the carbon in peanut butter does make the process a bit stickier. The transformation is also very slow, as it takes weeks to make a two-or-three-mm diamond.
So, finally we can say that the tasty toast topping that sticks to the roof of our mouth can also be used to make something that can cost tens of thousands of dollars!