Mercury in the Sky with Diamonds

Hello, friends!  Today’s post is mainly intended for Sci-Fi writers, but I’m hoping others will find it interesting, too.

Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun, perhaps the most overlooked and under-appreciated planet in the Solar System, may possess a precious and beautiful secret: diamonds.  So many diamonds!  Tiny diamonds may be scattered all across Mercury’s surface, with even more diamond buried deep, deep, deep underground.

Superficially, Mercury looks a lot like Earth’s moon.  They’re both rocky, airless worlds peppered with impact craters.  They’re both kind of grey, except Mercury is a darker shade of grey than the Moon.  That darker color is caused by graphite (the same graphite found in pencil lead).

For whatever reason, when Mercury first formed, it ended up with an overabundance of carbon (and an underabundance of stuff that would normally react with carbon).  As a result, carbon atoms combined with other carbon atoms to produce plain, simple graphite.

But as I said, Mercury (like the Moon) is covered with impact craters.  A whole lot of impact craters.  In fact, Mercury is the #1 most heavily cratered planet in the Solar System.  And so, whenever an asteroid or comet rammed full speed into Mercury, the force of that impact would have put Mercury’s graphite under sudden and extreme pressure—enough pressure to compress ordinary graphite into diamond.

According to one source I read (see the “want to learn more?” section below), there’s an estimated 16 quadrillion tons of diamond on Mercury’s surface.  That’s about 16 times more diamond than the estimated total amount of diamond we have here on Earth.  But wait, there’s more!  According to another source I read (again, see the “want to learn more?” section below), Mercury may also have a layer of pure diamond buried deep underground.  This diamond layer would be roughly 10 miles thick, and it would lie roughly 300 miles down.

Given that synthetic diamonds already exist, would Mercury’s superabundance of diamonds be worth anything in the distant future?  I don’t know, but I feel like there’s potential here for a Sci-Fi story.  Whenever I learn a weird and quirky science fact like this, I treat it like a writing prompt and see if any good Sci-Fi ideas come out of it.

But I don’t have any plans to write a story about diamond mining on Mercury, which is why I’m sharing this weird and quirky science fact here on the blog, so other Sci-Fi writers can read this and ponder over it.  The planet Mercury is brimming with diamonds—way, way more diamonds than we have here on Earth.  How would you use that science fact for science fiction?

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Here’s an article from Science News explaining how impact events on Mercury create diamonds on Mercury’s surface.

And here’s an article from Live Science explaining how a 10 mile thick layer of diamond might have formed deep beneath Mercury’s surface.

Also, I did another post on Mercury just a couple of weeks ago.  If you want to learn a few more fast facts about Mercury, click here.