This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. First, it was Diamond Rain on Uranus and Neptune.

And now scientists believe that our very own planet may be full of the very same gemstone.

And it's just a hunch, but they suspect that as much as 2% of the Earth is made up of diamonds.

So what makes them suspect our planets chock full of the sparkly stuff? Well, here to tell us that story, as well as other short subjects in science, is Ryan Mandelbaum, science writer for Cosmodo. Always good to see, Ryan. Yeah, always great, seeing you, Ira. How's everything going? Hey, so you know the song, the Earth moves under my feet? Well, there are diamonds under my feet? Maybe.

So what happened was there's these cores of continents called cratons, you know, the oldest part of our continents.

And sound waves moved too quickly through them.

And some scientists did some calculating, some lab experiments, and figured out that if the earth was both 50% of a of one

kind of rock and then 2% diamonds it would explain the sound waves moving too fast so it's a

hypothesis is what I'm going to say but it would be crazy of course do we know where they might

be so we can start looking for them? It would be like 100 miles underground.

And so, I mean, the issue is that, well, when the diamond ore comes to the surface of the earth, it doesn't contain 2% diamonds.

So the question is, okay, well, if they're there, where are the diamonds?

So, you know, like I said, a hypothesis, but people are looking and maybe.

Is there any way to follow up this with an experiment of something?

Well, unless you recreate the movie, The Core, it's going to be pretty hard.

But, I mean, there's just more modeling and more observations to be done.

I mean, with more science, hopefully they'll be able to find something out.

Would these be the same kinds of diamonds I'm getting at the jewelry store? They wouldn't be quite as pretty. They wouldn't be cut diamonds. No, but I guess diamonds are carbon, right? So I'm still carbon. And it would be crazy for the earth to have that much carbon underneath in the mantle like that. I mean, it would be important. Listen to this segue I'm going to do. Dark, black, diamond. Well, you know, carbon, there's a story you have about the black sarcophagus in Egypt. You really love this one, I know. I've been, if you are on Twitter today, you should look at the jokes that people are making. What happened was on July 1st, in Egypt, there was a sarcophagus found a 2,000-year-old sarcophagus in Alexandria, Egypt, and everybody thought this black granite thing might, you know, maybe it's curse, like, should we open the sarcophagus, and lest we unleash some crazy, you know, thing? But they opened it up yesterday, and it was not nearly as exciting.

It was three skeletons in a pool of red sewage.

Highly disappointing, I imagine.

Disappointing, but still scientifically interesting.

I mean, these skeletons are, again, they're 2,000 years old inside this sarcophagus.

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