You are getting your lunch out while at work. Gosh, the lunch at this new job puts you in a time crunch. Ever since you arrived the boss treats you like a fool. You just breathe in and out patiently explaining everything. In your green lunch bag you have a Caesar salad, gouda cheese and olive crackers and grapes. You love grapes and just found out about Heirloom grapes. As you bite into one, you find a pit in the grape. Who knew grapes had seeds in them? They are as hard as a diamond, although diamonds are the hardest known objects. But after biting into the grape you just had a feeling that diamonds may not be the hardest object. This makes you wonder, are diamonds the hardest substances known? Let’s pop this balloon to find out!
What are diamonds?
A diamond is a form of pure carbon in which every atom is bonded to four others in a rigid three-dimensional lattice. That structure is what makes it the hardest natural substance known, scoring a 10 on the Mohs scale, and it is also why diamonds bend light so strongly and sparkle the way they do. The same element arranged differently gives you graphite, the soft grey material in a pencil, where the carbon sits in flat sheets that slide over each other. Natural diamonds formed deep in the Earth’s mantle, roughly 150 kilometers down, under enormous pressure and heat, and most are over a billion years old. They reached the surface through rare volcanic eruptions that carried them up quickly in a rock called kimberlite. Major sources today include Russia, Botswana, Canada, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Diamonds can also be made in laboratories, and these are chemically identical to mined ones rather than imitations. Beyond jewelry, most diamonds by volume are used industrially, for cutting, drilling, and grinding, because nothing else holds an edge against hard material the same way.
Are diamonds the hardest substances known?
This myth is half-true. Diamonds are not the hardest substance but hardest naturally occurring minerals that anybody . In fact they are a 10 on the Mohs scale which measures the resistance of minerals. Although Lonsdaleite is naturally occurring mineral that forms when meteorites hit the Earth, and it’s found in impact sites. This myth did come since the University of Illinois physicist says real samples of lonsdaleite aren’t as hard as real diamonds. The harder version of these minerals is a defect-free ideal nobody has produced. Natural lonsdaleite comes out of violent impacts full of flaws. Lonsdaleite, found in meteorites, is theoretically harder — but nobody has found a sample good enough to test. So the natural material may well lose to natural diamond even if perfect lonsdaleite would win. So technically, natural diamond is harder but lonsdaleite does have a theoretical hard one.
Fun Facts
An old name for diamonds are adamant, which is where “adamant” meaning stubborn comes from itself. Diamond with nanometer-sized grains is harder and tougher than ordinary large crystals, so it works better as an abrasive. Australia had a mine that produced pink and red diamonds, and it closed, so no new ones are coming out of the ground. Some diamonds glow under ultraviolet light, usually blue, and a few keep glowing after the light goes off.