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Under great pressure and temperature in the mantle, the carbon is squeezed into a tight crystaline format.

The Quick Version - Diamond Formation

While the formation of diamonds may still be largely a mystery, one thing is know precisely - where on the earth's surface they occur: in kimberlite, a type of rock named after the South African town of Kimberley, where it was first identified in 1880.

Kimberlite is the heterogeneous product of a chaotic genesis, for this is the rock which was explosively transported through the "pipes" out of the earth's mantle to the top. Besides solidified magma of varying composition, kimberlite contains fragments of rock which it carried along on its impetuous journey.

Deposits of diamond-bearing kimberlite, which were found in Africa, Brazil, India, Australia, North America and Sibiria, occur only in the oldest and most stable continental regions, far removed from the restless zones where the rigid plates making up the earth's crusts move away from each other, scrape along each other or collide. Under these old, undisturbed continental plates, the so-called "shields", the crust is thickest, its weight generating pressures high enough to produce diamonds in the upper regions of the mantle, the place of origin of the kimberlite.

Many kimberlite deposits formed 70 to 150 million years ago; indeed, some of those found were up to 1.2 billion years old. As the kimberlite probably contained large amounts of solid rock, it did not spurt from the fissures in the earth's surface like liquid lava. Rather, the pressure of the rising magma probably resulted in the surface rock bulging upward and then collapsing in the centre when the gasses driving the kimberlite had escaped. In the thus formed crater it solidified to a rock deposit with a diameter of a few hundred metres to 1.5 kilometres. Here the primary deposits of diamonds had formed, i.e. the diamonds are at the place where they had originally risen to the earth's surface (opp.: secondary deposit).

Like any other category of rock on the surface of the earth, these craters, too, were attacked by water, wind, ice or chemicals of the atmosphere. Through this they are flattened and eroded, producing the so-called "yellow ground". This is the kimberlite weathered by the above-named influences, in which the first diamonds from primary deposits were found in South Africa.

The unweathered kimberlite beneath it, "blue ground", was not recognised as diamond-bearing until later.Gravity, wind and water carry off the fragments of the craters and deposit them, often over long distances, as sediments into river beds, alluvial plains and on the bottom of the sea.

While rock is worn down through the slow process of erosion, the much harder diamonds , which are not crushed even through the extremely long-lasting rolling and pushing, remain undamaged and are slowly washed downstream. There they accumulate gradually in the so-called alluvial deposits. These secondary deposits are usually richer, more concentrated deposits than the primary deposits, having already undergone a screening process: The rock surrounding the diamonds, because it is softer and lighter, is swept away farther, but the diamonds stay put. (diamondclub.com)