1When you think of crystals or gemstones, what do you think of?
2Rubies, emeralds maybe?
3Well I like to think of these.
4Some of the largest crystals in the world.
5And they were only discovered fairly recently, in a cave in Mexico about 1,000 feet underground.
6This week's question comes from someone named Adam.
7Let's give him a call now.
8- Hi Doug.
9- Hey Adam.
10- I have a question for you.
11How are diamonds made?
12- That is a great question.
13Well, it turns out that most diamonds aren't actually made at all.
14They're something people have to find.
15Diamonds are just one type of crystal or mineral.
16Here on Earth, we find so many different kinds.
17There are thousands of different kinds of minerals.
18Usually found like this, where they're surrounded or stuck inside of ordinary rock.
19And when we do find these different minerals,
20they almost always have these amazing shapes with lots of flat sides, like this.
21That's completely natural, that's how they look when they're found.
22But some minerals are a lot more rare than others. They're harder to find.
23The rarest most beautiful minerals are the ones that we call precious gemstones.
24These are minerals you've probably heard of.
25Minerals like ruby, sapphire, emerald, and diamond.
26Because diamonds are so rare and considered by many people to be so beautiful,
27they're worth a lot of money.
28The bigger and more beautiful-looking the diamond, the more it's worth.
29But even a diamond this size can sell for as much as $3,000.
30Now, diamonds are really hard to find, but when they are found,
31like most minerals, they're found surrounded or stuck inside of ordinary rock.
32In the case of diamonds, usually they're stuck inside a type of greenish-brown volcanic rock called kimberlite.
33Part of why it's so hard to find diamonds is that there isn't a lot of kimberlite on Earth.
34When people do find kimberlite rock, they start digging, and searching,
35and digging, and digging, and digging.
36In most places on Earth where diamonds were found,
37you can see that people have created huge holes where they were searching for more.
38But if diamonds are so difficult to find,
39could we actually make them instead of finding them?
40Well, you and I, we're definitely not the first person to wonder that question because...
41if you could come up with some way to make diamonds, you'd probably get rich, right?
42Over the years, lots of people have tried to make diamonds.
43But to even begin to try,
44first you'd have to figure out what material diamonds are made of.
45Is it glass?
46Some kind of really hard plastic?
47Before I say anything more, now would be a good time to pause the video and discuss.
48What material do you think diamonds are made of?
49Okay, you ready?
50Nobody could even begin to try to make a diamond without knowing first what diamonds are made of.
51Well, in the late 1700s, a group of French scientists did an experiment that figured this out.
52They took a diamond and heated it up using a giant magnifying lens.
53They were shocked when they found out
54that as they heated the diamond up, it turned into a type of gas called carbon dioxide.
55This is the same thing that happens when you heat a piece of charcoal.
56These scientists realized that diamonds and charcoal are made of the same material.
57It's a material that in English, we call carbon,
58which is from the French word for charcoal.
59So does that mean if you had a piece of charcoal you could turn it into a diamond?
60In theory, yes, that's exactly what it means
61and people tried that for many years.
62But it never would seem to work out. They kept failing.
63It turns out what's also needed is an incredible amount of pressure,
64like what you'd find deep in the earth.
65It wasn't until around the 1950s that we finally had the technology
66to create the kind of pressure needed to turn a piece of charcoal into a diamond.
67Even today, the machines we have, which can create incredible pressure,
68can only create very small diamonds.
69But scientists have recently discovered a different method of making diamonds,
70one that doesn't need a lot of pressure.
71It could be that in the future, as this technology gets even better,
72diamonds won't be something rare at all, not if we can make them.
73That's all for this week's question.
74Thanks Adam for asking it.