Tons of diamonds beneath the Earth's surface

SEE-July22: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), revealed this week in a new study that diamonds are about 1,000 times more common than people think they are.

A team of researchers estimated that a quadrillion tons of diamonds lie below the Earth's surface. They used seismic activity (same technology used to measure earthquake) which uses sound waves traveling through the Earth to make measurements.

The traveling waves depend on temperature and composition. Scientists found that the sound waves move faster through the bottom of the cratons. They travel through diamond twice as fast as other rocks.

The study included researchers from different national and international institutions. Such as, the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, the University of Melbourne and the University of Science and Technology of China.

"The location of the diamonds at the base of the cratons makes the most sense, as diamonds are formed via extreme pressure and extreme heat. So the weight from all the rock above provides ideal conditions for their formation deep in the Earth's mantle." said Ulrich Faul, a researcher in MIT and works in the lab with a team of seismologists, geochemists and other scientists.

Diamonds lie far deeper than any drills can reach; they are 100 miles below the Earth.

Researchers presumed cratonic roots were 1-2% of diamond. In a bid to roughly measure the amount of diamond exist, researchers estimated that there was quadrillion tons of diamonds which is 1,000 times more than what is thought.