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Diamond or gold, which is rarer and more expensive?

2024-09-16 13:42:05Lifestyle SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX

Diamond or gold, which is rarer and more expensive?

Diamonds are practically forever, and gold is precious, but which is rarer? And, just as importantly, does this rarity really affect the price we see in jewelry stores? During the formation of our planet, the heavier elements were pulled into the earth's core. This is why the closer to the surface, the less gold and other heavy elements are found in the rock.

Gold is present in a large number of rocks in the earth's crust, but to form a deposit, it is necessary to reach certain concentrations of this metal so that mining becomes economically viable.

According to Yana Fedorchuk, co-director of the High Pressure Experimental Geological Research Laboratory at Dalhousie University in Halifax, the average concentration of gold in the earth's crust is “very, very low” – 4 ppb. In order for the gold to be mined for the product to have any meaningful market value, she says, the gold deposit must be 1,250 times more concentrated than this average value.

Diamonds, on the other hand, are a form of a very common element: carbon, under high pressure. In its unsealed form, it is known as graphite, a pencil material. Compared to gold, the average concentration of carbon in the earth's crust is approximately 200,000 parts per billion.

The rarity of diamonds has little to do with their chemical composition, it is provided by the natural geological processes of converting carbon into diamonds, which require very specific conditions.

True, in the latter case, they will be small and unlikely to be useful to jewelers, so their cost is low. Diamonds formed deep in the Earth's mantle can be lifted from deep magma or pushed up during the slow uplift of deep rocks during mountain growth processes. But during this process, diamonds graphitize [that is, they exist in the form of graphite] and never come to the surface as gemstones.

The formula required for the formation of diamonds depends on depth, temperature and pressure: the carbon must lie at least 150 kilometers below the Earth's surface and be heated to about 1,200 degrees Celsius at a pressure of about 5 billion pascals.

After that, a certain factor such as a volcanic eruption must push the future diamond to the surface, where it will cool and crystallize. This unusual process makes naturally mined diamonds rarer than gold.

But in its elemental form, gold is much rarer than diamonds. After all, carbon is one of the most abundant elements on earth, especially when compared to heavier metals like gold, and a diamond is made purely of carbon under tremendous pressure.

The invention of synthetic diamonds further complicates the matter. Scientists can recreate the conditions needed to turn graphite into diamonds in the lab, no volcanic eruption required, but the same cannot be said for gold (alchemy is still a pseudoscience, unfortunately).

Although synthetic diamonds are made of the same substance as natural diamonds, they usually sell for 30% less in the market. So what makes up the price in the end? In fact, it is exclusively from the manipulations of marketers and current economic processes.

Both gold as a metal and diamonds as a substance are worth a lot but the people themselves make them astronomically expensive, whether it is the masterwork of a jeweler or the unusual circumstances in which the precious stone was mined, as well as its unique characteristics.


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