Diamonds remain the most scratch-resistant material known to humanity. The structure of boron nitride in its wurtzite configuration is stronger than diamonds. Boron nitride can also be used to construct nanotubes, aerogels, and a wide variety of other fascinating applications.

Diamond is the hardest material known, defining the upper end of the 1-10 scale known as Moh’s hardness scale. Diamond cannot be melted; above 1700 °C it is converted to graphite, the more stable form of carbon. The diamond unit cell is face-centered cubic and contains eight carbon atoms.

The outermost shell of each carbon atom has four electrons. In diamond, these electrons are shared with four other carbon atoms to form very strong chemical bonds resulting in an extremely rigid tetrahedral crystal. It is this simple, tightly-bonded arrangement that makes diamond one of the hardest substances on Earth.

Diamond is the hardest naturally occurring substance found on Earth. But it is not the hardest substance. Wurtzite boron nitride (synthetic) and lonsdaleite (which comes from meteorites) are both harder.

As an example, you can scratch steel with a diamond, but you can easily shatter a diamond with a hammer. The diamond is hard, the hammer is strong. Whether something is hard or strong depends on its internal structure. This makes the diamond incredibly hard and is why it is able to scratch any other material.

Do Black Diamonds sparkle? Yes, but not in the way a white diamond does. That’s because, unlike white diamonds, black diamonds are not see-through. As a result, these black gems glitter with a metallic kind of shine, instead of a refractive firework sparkle.

Pound for pound, diamonds are not very good at stopping bullets. The energy absorbed by diamond shattering is much less than the energy absorbed by metals deforming. A plate of steel would be better at stopping bullets than a plate of diamond.

The diamond mining industry is destroying our environment. A lot of diamond mining is unregulated and therefore there is no control over its impact on the environment. If that wasn’t bad enough, they are also releasing extensive amounts of carbon emissions into the air from diamond exploration and mining.

What would happen if you shoot a diamond? If you hit a diamond at the right angle hard enough it will break apart. The diamond would shatter. Diamonds are hard, but brittle, so sufficient force would crack the diamond.

However, after density tests, scientists found that Carmeltazite is even harder than diamond and is significantly scarcer, making it extremely high. According to the BBC, the region near the Savulun valley is known for volcanic activity dating back to the Cretaceous period.

Tensile Strength: Diamond has the highest tensile strength of any material, at 2.8 gigapascals. I tested this once actually. about 2 pounds sometimes works, 3 pounds almost always, and 4 is always to break the diamond.

Originally Answered: Could a state of the art Roman Empire shield and armor set stop modern bullets from harming the user? No way. Roman shields were actually made of wood with reinforced metal edges. A bullet would go straight through the shield and would probably go through the armor too.

According to Wikipedia, the temperature of lava is between 700 and 1200 °C (973 to 1473 K). The melting point of Diamond at about 100,000 atm is 4200 K, which is much higher than the temperature of lava. So, it is impossible for lava to melt a diamond.

Steel and other rocks can be used to easily crush a diamond. Like I said earlier, super heating a diamond can set it on fire, and even throwing diamonds into your furnace will burn them all up.

Absolutely not. Even the most resilient microbes on our planet cannot survive temperatures higher than about 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Magma is usually 1500 degrees CELSIUS or higher, which is EXTREMELY hot, and far beyond what any life that we know of can survive.

In the absence of oxygen, diamonds can be heated to much higher temperatures. Above the temperatures listed below, diamond crystals transform into graphite. The ultimate melting point of diamond is about 4,027° Celsius (7,280° Fahrenheit).

Can you burn a diamond with a lighter? You can’t inadvertently set your diamond ring on fire with a cigarette lighter. But, because diamonds are pure carbon, they do react with oxygen by burning. Burning a diamond requires liquid oxygen and a very hot torch.

Yes, diamonds burn. There are many substantiated insurance claims of diamonds being destroyed in fires. So, technically, if you have a non-nitrogenated, flawless, pure-white diamond, you can turn it into CO2 with the application of heat.

Another type of injury that happens to diamonds is excessive heating, as in fire exposure. If a diamond is heated to a high enough temperature, it can unite with the oxygen from the air causing blemishes. The damage to the stone can be substantial and fixing it will result in a loss of weight.

At ~700 degrees Fahrenheit the diamond will start burning. This will produce Carbon Dioxide and change the structure so that it is no longer a diamond. As diamond is made of Carbon, it would revert back to that form while losing its mass to the production of CO2. This is due to the presence of Oxygen.

Real diamonds are incredibly dense, and often outmatch the fakes in density tests. To confirm this, fill a glass up with water and drop your diamond in. A fake diamond will most likely float on top or only sink to the middle while a real diamond will sink to the bottom thanks to its density.

The gas mixture is heated to very high temperatures in the microwave to produce a plasma ball, and inside this, the gas breaks down and the carbon atoms crystallise and accumulate on the diamond seed, causing it to grow.

Diamond is very hard due to the strong covalent bonds and rigid tetrahedral 3d arrangement. It does not conduct electricity, as there are no electrons free to move and carry charge. Carbon atoms have four unpaired electrons and can form four covalent bonds.