Jewellery ads on our radio stations advertise lab grown diamonds. This sounds interesting and exotic. Things "grown" in labs.
They used to be known as synthetic diamonds. They are created in a laboratory environment. These diamonds can be a more ethical choice than natural diamonds, as mining is not needed to produce them. Here's what the BBC had to say in their article on lab-made diamonds:
"On a grey January morning in 2019 Meghan Markle emerged onto a London street on her way to a meeting. She wore a smart coat and heels, but it was not her clothing that caught the attention of the world. It was a pair of glittering drop earrings embedded with diamonds that had been grown in a lab. It took just five days to grow the diamonds adorning Markle’s ears according to Sidney Neuhaus, co-founder of Kimaï, the company that made them. Based in Antwerp."
A lab-grown diamond is a diamond: chemically, physically and optically identical to a mined diamond. There are two ways to grow a diamond. Both involve starting with the “seed” (a flat slither) of another diamond. The first lab diamond was made using a High Pressure High Temperature (HPHT) system, where the seed is then placed amidst some pure graphite carbon and exposed to temperatures of about 1,500C and pressurised to approximately 1.5 million pounds per square inch in a chamber.
More recently, another way to grow a diamond was discovered, called Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD). This involves putting the seed in a sealed chamber filled with carbon-rich gas and heating to around 800C. Under these conditions the gases begin to “stick” to the seed, growing a diamond carbon atom by atom.
The article goes on to demonstrate how mined diamonds are unethical making lab-grown diamonds a likely better choice. So did the comics and Superman making a diamond out of a lump of coal foretell that lab-grown diamonds would happen? I look this up and have to be reminded that neither process for forming natural diamonds nor synthetic diamonds uses coal. Diamonds created in laboratories are formed using graphite.
Here's the conclusion: " If you hand Superman a stocking full of coal, best case scenario, he can make some real low-grade diamonds that really aren’t gonna fetch you much. A more realistic outcome is that he’s gonna hand you back a fistful of black powder. The good news is if you have an aunt or a grandma that gave you a pack of pencils for Christmas, now we’re in business."
And definitely ice crystals will not result in diamonds in the lab. These ones looked wonderful to me, inspiring the title of the image
No comments:
Post a Comment