Peanut butter generally is never thought of as anything more than a yummy sandwich spread, when in fact, it can also be used to make diamonds.
Dan Frost, a scientist in Germany at the Bayerisches Geoinstitut, has been attempting to recreate the crystalline structures found within the Earth’s lower mantle.
Frost believes carbon dioxide plays a large role within the mantle, and the carbon from that is what helps create the diamonds. It’s possible that the CO2 was pulled from Earth’s oceans down into the mantle, where it was then, over time, turned into diamonds.
Creating diamonds from carbon-rich peanut butter came into play after being pushed by a German TV station. The hydrogen released helped generate a diamond, but also ruined the experiment.
The diamonds created are tiny, and haven been compared to the size of a fennel seed. The stone’s coloring is murky, hardly something meant to grace an engagement ring or other piece of fine jewelry.
They also take weeks to cultivate, and involve insanely high heat and pressure. Ideally, instead of retail, the peanut butter generated diamonds would be a less costly form of artificial diamonds to be utilized in superconductors and quantum computing.
