Mercury, the desolate, scorched rock that orbits the sun at about 0.4 percent of the Earth’s distance, may have a 10 mile-thick mantle of pure diamond underneath its outer crust, Space.com reports citing data crunched from NASA’s MESSENGER probe mission that ended in 2015.
“We calculate that, given the new estimate of the pressure at the mantle-core boundary, and knowing that Mercury is a carbon-rich planet, the carbon-bearing mineral that would form at the interface between mantle and core is diamond and not graphite,” said research team member Olivier Namur. “Our study uses geophysical data collected by the NASA MESSENGER spacecraft.”
Namur said that the mantle likely formed eons ago when a liquid carbon ocean became heated and compressed into diamond. He did not go on to speculate about what it will be like for our descendants to have to toil in oxygenated mines and paid shit wages by some Weyland-Yutani-like megacorporation to exploit the massive vein of diamond since that’s obviously where this is going.
Lest the be any doubt about that, directly to the right of this story on Space.com’s homepage is an article titled “Alien: The Xenomorph life cycle explained,” subheaded “Ahead of Alien: Romulus, We explore every stage of the Xenomorphs’ gruesome life cycle and its evolution across the entire Alien saga.” Cool how a site for science just prints science fiction without any editorial distinction.