How are diamonds and coal related?
You may have heard that diamonds come from coal. Is this true? And how does it happen? Coal and diamonds are related, but it's not true that diamonds come from coal.
Coal and diamonds both share the same base, carbon, but are still very different. Diamonds are essentially pure carbon formed into a crystalline structure. The rarer, colored diamonds do contain minor impurities (boron, for example, makes diamonds blue, while nitrogen turns them yellow), but those impurities exist on a scale of just one atom in a million.
Coal is also mostly carbon, but it isn’t pure. Coal also includes many other substances, including hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, arsenic, selenium, and mercury. Depending on the type of coal and its source, it will also contain various levels of organic materials because coal originates from decaying plants, fungi and even bacteria. These impurities alone prevent coal from being turned into diamonds.
I think that we could use different techniques to make diamonds more readily available. One way may be to remove impurities from coal and then compress them with heat.
Comments
Post a Comment