text: Diamond isn't just the hardest substance known to man, it also may be a bit more common than we originally thought.
  Scientists believe they may have located more than a QUADRILLION tonnes of the it buried beneath the Earth's surface. It could be located as much as 100 miles down, according to a team of researchers from MIT .
  The diamond is located in the "cratonic roots" of the continents. Basically, the most ancient part of land on Earth that's down so deep that humans won't be able to get to it.
  "This shows that diamond is not perhaps this exotic mineral, but on the [geological] scale of things, it’s relatively common," said Ulrich Faul, a research scientist from MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.
  "We can’t get at them, but still, there is much more diamond there than we have ever thought before."
  Loosely translated, a quadrillion tonnes of diamond could fetch around £150,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 - which would likely destabilise the world's economy.
  The researchers made their discovery after sending sound waves down through the Earth's crust and found they moved quicker than expected through certain sections of rock. These cratonic roots are believed to be shaped like upside down mountains.
  The deepest humans have ever reached with conventional drilling is 7.5 miles in Russia - which took 20 years to bore and was abandoned when the Soviet Union collapsed.
  Dr Faul explained that the cratons "are like pieces of wood, floating on water. Cratons are a tiny bit less dense than their surroundings, so they don't get subducted back into the Earth but stay floating on the surface.
  "This is how they preserve the oldest rocks. So we found that you just need 1% to 2% diamond for cratons to be stable and not sink.
  "It's circumstantial evidence, but we've pieced it all together.
  "We went through all the different possibilities, from every angle, and this is the only one that's left as a reasonable explanation."