Those are Ukrainian Nanodiamonds in the picture. No, this is not a conspiracy theory. Nanodiamonds were discovered by the Russians in 1963 as a by-product of nuclear explosions using carbon detonators. A diamond under one hundred nanometers, (<100nm) is considered a nanodiamond. They are commercially produced today, primarily using controlled explosions (non-nuclear). The SKN Company of Russia was supposedly nominated for the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize for creating nanodiamonds using old, USSR-vintage munitions. I don’t know why the Ukrainians are selling nanodiamonds on eBay. I hope making them isn’t a cottage industry over there. I know the $7 shipping charge is reasonable, even with the seller’s caveats about timely delivery and a shipping weight well under an ounce. Globally, we have started using man-made nanodiamonds for all sorts of medical and industrial uses.
This is my long-delayed article about natural nanodiamonds. It’s been delayed because nanodiamonds are very small and hard to see and virtually nobody looks for them. I have been speculating there is a background global presence of nanodiamonds on the earth’s surface. I speculate about nanodiamonds because it relates to Louis Frank’s discovery of Small Comets. At this point most of my long-time readers will probably think, “not again.” My new subscribers will wonder, “what is he talking about?”
Briefly, in early 1982 Professor Louis A. Frank and his team of graduate students at the University of Iowa were trying to resolve what looked like ‘noise’ on the new images they were analyzing from Dynamics Explorer. Frank was NASA’s designated principal investigator for the auroral imaging instruments on the Dynamics Explorer Mission. ‘Spots,’ or what Frank and his students eventually called, “atmospheric holes” kept appearing in the new Dynamics Explorer’s images of the Earth’s UV dayglow. The spots were crashing the program. The brief, random darkening of a tiny cluster of pixels was not ignored by Frank, who was obsessive about his images and his data. Frank and his team made an exhaustive search for the cause of the ‘atmospheric holes’ and four years later, in 1986, Frank published his data and conclusions in Geophysical Research Letters. His conclusion was the ‘spots’ were images of something real and substantial. The ‘atmospheric holes’ were being caused by dense, miles-wide, clouds of water vapor which absorbed and obscured for a short time, Earth’s UV dayglow. Optically speaking, water vapor had to be the principal compound in the debris field after the Small Comets’ disintegration. Frank hypothesized that the Small Comets before entry into earth’s atmosphere were essentially snowballs with a thin carbon mantle.
Unfortunately for Professor Louis A. Frank, he had discovered approximately ten million Small Comets infalling into Earth’s atmosphere every year, a veritable, Cosmic Rain. In itself, the magnitude of his discovery is hard to believe. Sensually, Frank’s Small Comets are as invisible as the heliocentricity of our solar system. “How can there be that many meteoric objects, each weighing between twenty to one hundred tons, infalling (approximately one every three seconds) into the upper atmosphere and only Professor Louis A. Frank can image them?” “Show us your pictures.” “Looks like an imaging instrument artifact to us, looks exactly like noise.” A few scientists took Frank’s discovery seriously. Clayne Yeats, NASA’s science manager for the 1977 Galileo Mission, looked for the small comets’ water vapor trail and found them using images from the Space-watch telescope. Phillip Oliverio from Penn State University, using ground radar imaging found them. But the truth is, the geophysical ‘scientists’ as a whole were hostile to the idea and didn’t take Frank’s data seriously. Indeed. you can’t take Frank’s data seriously if you want to refute the discovery of Small Comets. It’s not possible to find errors in Frank’s work. No one has found any. “Looks like it’s probably instrument noise” was sufficient to bury in the peer-reviewed literature the most important discovery since Kepler discovered the planets circle the Sun in elliptical orbits. Lou Frank’s Small Comets and their discovery is essentially forgotten. It is the most disgraceful retreat from discovery and truth in the history of science.
So, back to nanodiamonds. If the Small Comets are disintegrating, ten million a year in earth’s atmosphere, and Frank’s hypothesis about the Small Comets’ carbon mantle is true, then possibly there is observable carbon evidence for the small comet infall. But first let’s look at the carbon mantle hypothesis. Why did Frank need a hypothesis about a carbon mantle to hold his Small Comets together? Two reasons: Something has to shield the snowball from the Sun’s increasing heat and prevent them from disintegrating as they travel towards the Sun. Second, the Small Comets are not seen. There is a reason why graphites (inorganic carbon) are used to coat the tiles on NASA’s Space Shuttle it protects them from heat on re-entry. Graphene is used to coat the surfaces on stealth aircraft. Carbon resists heat and absorbs spectrum. It’s the perfect material to protect and hide Frank’s Snowballs.
My interest in the Small Comets’ carbon mantles was piqued a couple of years ago when I read the surface of Mercury is very dark because the planet surface is predominantly graphite. Someone speculated the Mercury’s surface might also be covered with diamonds created by meteor impacts. Ten years ago, NASA’s Mercury Messenger Mission sent back remarkable images of Mercury’s surface, not only of the graphite which no one had previously speculated was there, but also images of, real-time, ‘hollows’ that appear, to me anyway, like what explosive small comet impact sites might look like on such a hot planet surface without an atmosphere.
Instead of an atmosphere, Mercury has an exosphere and it contains traces of water vapor and other volatiles that I assume Frank's Small Comets are delivering. Mercury’s surface has a rich mix of volatiles. Remarkably similar to the volatiles found in our seawater. Mercury’s exosphere even has a sodium tail. No one can explain why the volatiles are there.
Back to nanodiamonds. The Younger Dryas Boundry Layer Sediments (YDB) comet/meteor impact hypothesis proposes an impact of a disintegrating comet, or perhaps a swarm of comet debris, are responsible for the YDB boundary layer sediments. They point to an abundance of nanodiamonds, carbon-glass spherules and micro-spherules, carbon/graphite crystalline structures found in the YDB sediments. After reading several papers in the literature, I don’t doubt the proponents are onto something, but none of them share Louis Frank’s obsessive determination to get the data right. There have been more than a few embarrassing retractions. Oftentimes, you discover too late, you ought to have done a better experiment. The YDB hypothesis got me looking at the evidence for Meteoric Air Bursts or Bolide events.
Meteoric Air Bursts happen regularly, but infrequently. The 1908 Tunguska Event is an outlier because of its estimated explosive power, perhaps a twelve-megaton explosion. Twelve megatons are approximately ten times greater than the largest acknowledged nuclear weapon in the United States arsenal. The Tunguska Event flattened and burned eighty-million trees over an eight-hundred and thirty square mile area in a very sparsely populated location in central Siberia.
Airburst meteors leave no impact crater and produce none of the typical, larger, silicate/iron/nickel meteorite debris generally associated stony/iron meteors. Sediments associated with Tunguska Event are rich in carbon/graphite micro-spherules and nanodiamonds - but no one has found larger, typical, meteor fragments. Frank thought meteoric airbursts, Bolide events, like the Tunguska event were probably big, Small Comets.
The very recent 2013 Chelyabinsk event was also a meteoric airburst. One-thousand two hundred people were injured, thankfully, no one died. If you have a minute, you might look at a video of the event, here. The flash of light and the huge vapor trail would be consistent with Frank’s Small Comet hypothesis that the thin, strong, carbon mantle hides dense frozen water vapor with a consistency similar to snow. A huge cloud of dust hung in the sky for four days over Chelyabinsk before it was rained out. Researchers were able to capture the cosmic dust between layers of freshly fallen snow. It says in the linked, LiveScience article:
Further analysis using X-rays revealed that the crystals were made of layers of graphite — a form of carbon made from overlapping sheets of atoms, commonly used in pencils — surrounding a central nanocluster at the heart of the crystal. The researchers propose that the most likely candidates for these nanoclusters are buckminsterfullerene (C60), a cage-like ball of carbon atoms, or polyhexacyclooctadecane (C18H12), a molecule made from carbon and hydrogen.
Germane to our investigation into nanodiamonds is the very recent discovery of water-bearing carbon-glass spherules on the moon. It is not off-topic to suggest that Frank’s Small Comets are a simple explanation for how the water got inside the crystal-like, carbon-rich spherules. They estimate there are a lot of these spherules. They cover the surface for forty feet down. The Chinese flew the samples home for examination and estimate there are at least 270 billion metric tons of water trapped in the spherules. That’s not mentioning the trillion tons of water in the shaded polar craters. Articles about recently discovered water on the Moon and Mercury speculate solar wind makes the water. That’s what the articles say. I’ve got my doubts. Frank’s experiment was a good one. There is no solar wind-making-water experiment. This is magical thinking. They need to curb their enthusiastic speculations.
One of the most frustrating things Frank had to contend with was answering the objections concerning the moon. It is also being bombarded with the small comets - so where is the evidence? Frank did his best, insisting that yes, the evidence for the small comets is indeed up there on the moon’s surface. We just have to look. His critics did their worst research misdeeds in not seriously looking at the moon’s surface for small comet impact evidence. Bad experiments lead to erroneous conclusions. “We can’t see anything.” In 2023 we can see the evidence now. Too bad no one remembers what we were looking for.
BTW, I am speculating about the ‘carbon-rich’ part. About the Moon’s ‘carbon-rich’ glass spherules filled with water. The Chinese don’t think it’s very important? I don’t know. It’s not like I haven’t searched for a reference. I will keep trying and I bet I eventually find it. I’ll tell you when that fish is in the creel. Even without the reference - the evidence of the small comets’ carbon mantles is piling up like a standing wave.
15 miles. (I did read the whole thing.)
BTW, Science is not science any more. When I was growing up I was given a definition for science and I (naturally) thought that I was given THE definition and I could rely on that definition when in conversation with people. In other words, people with some notion of what science is and were happy and confident in their use of the word actually agreed on the definition. Boy was I wrong! Now it seems that there is no generally accepted and common definition of the word. Whenever I hear or read the word science I immediately wonder if they mean science when they use the word. Many times they mean science to mean what some scientist said. So, science depends to what some scientist said? What scientist? Who said what? Can the scientist be trusted? Why should I believe a thing just because someone said it when I don't know I can trust the scientist or the person quoting the scientist? Generally speaking, I don't trust people at all. It is much better to do my own thinking even if I make mistakes. At least they are MY mistakes and I can acknowledge them and change my mind on a thing. The saddest situation is when I encounter someone that is unable to deal constructively with contradictory evidence. And that harks to the concept of black and white thinking. And that, in turn is not about race!!!! Either you get it or you don't but that is not my problem. It's on you.