A new paper out today in Nature offers some good news and bad news about volcanic eruptions. First, the bad news.
The researchers found that certain kinds of volcanoes can unleash a bunch of lava, then "recharge" with new magma from deep in the Earth within a matter of days or weeks. Previously, scientists believed it would take much longer for this recharging to happen. So one of these volcanoes could actually be simultaneously erupting and recharging its magma chamber with superheated rock from the Earth's mantle.
SEXPANDColumbia University Earth scientists Philipp Ruprech and Terry Plank described the situation as "the highway from hell." Because really, let's just call it what it is.
The good news is that this information could help us predict volcanic eruptions months in advance. By monitoring small earthquakes deep in the Earth's crust, where these rapid recharges are happening, seismologists might know when an eruption is coming. Usually, volcanic activity is monitored from the Earth's surface, where small and large quakes will signal that an eruption might be near — especially if the Earth is bulging over the top of the volcano. Now we know that some volcanoes might prepare for their eruptions deep underground, too.
Read the full scientific paper in Nature, or read a description of the findings inDiscover.
Russia admits to having 'trillions of carats' worth of diamonds hidden in an asteroid crater
Back in the 1970s, the Soviet government discovered a rather remarkable deposit of precious gems in a 100 kilometer (62 mile) crater located in eastern Siberia. Called the Popigai crypto-explosion structure, it contains "impact diamonds" — massive mineral deposits that formed when an asteroid hit the area 35-million years ago.
The Russians have kept it a secret all this time, but recently declassified documents now reveal the true extent of the hoard — a cache of diamonds that could supply global markets for another 3,000 years.
Impact diamonds are formed when an asteroid strikes an area rich in graphite deposits. The resulting super-dense minerals are twice as hard as regular diamonds and feature a large grain size. Diamonds like these are highly valued not just for their aesthetic qualities, but also for their use in high-precision scientific and industrial processes (applications like metalworking, the production of efficient semiconductors, and so on).
And according to the ITAR-TASS Russian News Agency, the Russians chose to keep it a secret because of its pre-existing diamond operations at Mirny, Yakutia. By doing so, the Soviet government (and now the Russian Federation) was able to reap tremendous profits in an otherwise tightly controlled world market (nice, eh?). Moreover, it was also at this time that the Soviet government started to build plants that produced synthetic diamonds. In turn, they stopped all geological studies and all data on the field became classified.
The Russian government finally let the world in on their little secret at a recently concluded scientific conference in Novosibirsk — an acknowledgement that's sure to send shock waves through the global gem markets. Speaking to TASS, Russian geologist Nikolai Pokhilenko admitted that, "the first results of research were sufficient to talk about a possible overturn of the entire world market of diamonds."
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