Scientists from the University of Wollongong (Australia) have discovered that the rise of diamonds from the depths of the Earth to the surface occurs as a result of explosions of kimberlite, thanks to huge pillars of heat coming from a depth of 2,900 kilometers near the core. planet. This is reported in an article published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Kimberlite eruptions, which left a “tube”-shaped deposit of diamonds in the Earth’s crust, have occurred hundreds of times in the last 200 million years. Traces of explosions have been found around the world, including 788 in Canada, 158 in South Africa, 71 in Angola and 70 in Brazil. In the 1980s it was shown that eruptions of kimberlite could be associated with tiny mantle plumes between the mantle and core.

The researchers used supercomputers to create three-dimensional geodynamic models of billions of years of global mantle convection, including those associated with the subduction zone where the Pacific plate subducts under the continental South American plate. It turns out that the very deep layers of the Earth are connected to the surface by large mantle uplifts, or warm uplifts, which explain most of the kimberlite eruptions of the last two centuries.