Food - Drink
Is It Actually Possible To Turn Peanut Butter Into Diamonds?
By KATIE LENHARDT
If you’re looking for an engagement ring, various viral videos suggest that you can skip the jewelry store and grow your own diamonds by using a jar of peanut butter. If you think this sounds pretty far-out and too good to be true, you'd be right — but there is plenty of science behind this social media "hack."
Geophysicist Dan Frost was the first to discover a process that occurs in the Earth's mantle, in which carbon dioxide is pulled from the planet's crust into the layer underneath. When the carbon in CO2 is subjected to the immense pressure and high temperatures under the Earth's surface, crystals such as diamonds can form.
Peanut butter is a carbon-rich food, and diamonds can be made out of it, but under very specific conditions. The peanut butter must be under pressure that is 1.3 million times higher than that of the air found on the Earth's surface, plus temperatures that are found 500 miles below the surface — try replicating that in your kitchen.
Humans still have much to learn about Earth’s composition, and scientists are making crystals out of peanut butter to learn more about our planet, not to get more diamonds on the market. Without equipment powerful enough to test this phenomenon on our own, it's highly unlikely that any of us will own PB-grown diamonds anytime soon.