State of the Planet

News from the Columbia Climate School

Tag: diamonds

  • Hidden Within African Diamonds, a Billion-Plus Years of Deep-Earth History

    Hidden Within African Diamonds, a Billion-Plus Years of Deep-Earth History

    Fluids trapped within the stones are helping researchers reconstruct the deep history of the continent, and eventually maybe others.

  • Photo Essay: The Mystery of North American Diamonds

    Photo Essay: The Mystery of North American Diamonds

    People have been finding loose diamonds across the United States and Canada since the early 1800s, but for the most part, no one knows where they came from. It was not until the 1990s that geologists tracked down the first commercial deposits, on the remote tundra of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Yaakov Weiss, a geochemist at…

  • Cracking Open Diamonds for Messages From the Deep Earth

    Cracking Open Diamonds for Messages From the Deep Earth

    “After a diamond captures something, from that moment until millions of years later in my lab, that material stays the same. We can look at diamonds as time capsules, as messengers from a place we have no other way of seeing.”

Science for the Planet: In these short video explainers, discover how scientists and scholars across the Columbia Climate School are working to understand the effects of climate change and help solve the crisis.
  • Hidden Within African Diamonds, a Billion-Plus Years of Deep-Earth History

    Hidden Within African Diamonds, a Billion-Plus Years of Deep-Earth History

    Fluids trapped within the stones are helping researchers reconstruct the deep history of the continent, and eventually maybe others.

  • Photo Essay: The Mystery of North American Diamonds

    Photo Essay: The Mystery of North American Diamonds

    People have been finding loose diamonds across the United States and Canada since the early 1800s, but for the most part, no one knows where they came from. It was not until the 1990s that geologists tracked down the first commercial deposits, on the remote tundra of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Yaakov Weiss, a geochemist at…

  • Cracking Open Diamonds for Messages From the Deep Earth

    Cracking Open Diamonds for Messages From the Deep Earth

    “After a diamond captures something, from that moment until millions of years later in my lab, that material stays the same. We can look at diamonds as time capsules, as messengers from a place we have no other way of seeing.”