On: Woman Finds Yellow Diamond While Watching YouTube Video on How to Find Diamonds

[mullen]

Diamonds are just compacted carbon. If you could create a device that detected dense carbon objects, then it could find diamonds.

[bnegreve → mullen]

And since carbon is the 4th most frequent atom in the universe, you would also find a whole bunch of not-so-interesting things.

[ls612 → mullen]

This hypothetical device would also find every living organism around it as well so it would be kinda useless.

[rc_hadoken → ls612]

I'm not a scientist but surely theres a threshold density for diamonds that is far above rocks/living objects?

[brippalcharrid → rc_hadoken]

Density of rocks seems to top out around 3.2 g/cm³[0], but if you could find a way of scanning for material that was 99%+ Carbon and which had the density of diamond (3.51 g/cm³) and you could detect very small buried items, then that might be a start.

https://chem.libretexts.org/Ancillary_Materials/Exemplars_an...

[dragonwriter → rc_hadoken]

> surely theres a threshold density for diamonds that is far above rocks

Nope, diamond is 3.51g/cm³, some rocks are in the same density range.

[Florin_Andrei → rc_hadoken]

Diamond's density is 3.5 g/cm3, nothing special.