Cornelia Class News Today

A volcanic island in the southwestern Indian Ocean, Anjouan, has a strange geological mystery. Residents and geologists on the island keep finding an unusual rock. The island is made of basalt, which formed when tectonic plates shifted away and magma rose and cooled in an ocean basin. Quartzite, a sedimentary rock made from quartz sand …

Scientists are puzzled how half a mountain of quartzite was found on the young volcanic island of Anjouan. Read more here.

Gazing Into a Diamonds Flaws Has Revealed Hidden Clues About How Our Planet Formed 15 MAY 2021 More than mere beautiful, coveted stones, diamonds hold another sort of wealth: fragments of Earths deep history.  From flaws within the minerals near-perfect lattice, scientists have just worked out how to extract long-hidden records of our planets past.   "We like the ones that no one else really wants," said geochemist Yaakov Weiss from Columbia University, referring to the diamonds full of imp...

Diamond liquid impurities provide new insights into ancient Earth Yaakov Weiss Yaakov Weiss 2/3 The researchers analyzed the ratio of elements in liquid pockets trapped in diamonds, and identified three separate periods of diamond formation in Africas ancient past Yaakov Weiss Yaakov Weiss Geologists have studied tiny pockets of fluids trapped inside diamonds to get a better understanding of how old humanity’s favorite rocks might be. In doing so, they identified three...

 E-Mail IMAGE: A diamond encapsulating tiny bits of fluid from the deep earth, held here by fine tweezers, was part of a study delving into the age and origins of South African... view more  Credit: Yaakov Weiss Diamonds are sometimes described as messengers from the deep earth; scientists study them closely for insights into the otherwise inaccessible depths from which they come. But the messages are often hard to read. Now, a team has come up with a way to solve two longstanding puz...

(Yaakov Weiss) Most diamonds are thought to form some 150 to 200 kilometers under the surface, in relatively cool masses of rock beneath the continents. The process may go back as far as 3.5 billion years, and probably continues today. Occasionally, they are carried upward by powerful, deep-seated volcanic eruptions called kimberlites. (Don’t expect to see one erupt today; the youngest known kimberlite deposits are tens of millions of years old.) Much of what we know about diamonds comes from...