Hello all!  I'll get to the diamonds - promise.
But first, a quick story:

Back in 2007, I got to go visit the country of Iceland. The trip was amazing in so many ways. But experiencing a glacier firsthand was by far one of my favorite parts.

<-- Here's a photo I snapped of The Glacier Lagoon (Jökulsárlón), at the base of Europe's largest glacier: Vatnajokull.

Our group took a boat ride (on one of those cool, hardcore amphibious boats with wheels!) through the run-off lake formed at the edge of the glacier.

 
The water was littered with large and small pieces of icebergs, calved off of the massive glacier. There were seals atop some of the larger icebergs, lazily basking in the sun.

Our boat's guide  pulled one of the smaller iceberg chunks up on the boat, and broke off pieces for us to sample.

<-- I got to taste 15,000+ year old ice - what a treat!

The reason I'm reminiscing about my glacial adventure is because of some new discoveries: scientists have been using lasers to study the melting point of diamonds.

With heat, diamonds generally turn into graphite. But when these scientists subjected diamonds to serious pressure (try 40 million times greater than on Earth), and temperatures exceeding 50,000 degrees, the diamond liquefied without becoming graphite first. 

To read more about these diamond discoveries, check out the Popular Science article here, and the original Discovery News story here.

Once heated, melted diamonds behave like water - solids float on liquid. So that means that the temperatures and atmospheric pressures of planets like Neptune and Uranus could be conducive to having oceans made up of liquefied diamond.

And floating within all that liquidy diamond could be larger chunks of solid diamond, much like icebergs. Wow, did my imagination had a hay day with that thought - I actually got giddy just dreaming up this crazy and beautiful, and odd environment.

So all of that dreaming and imagining brought my mind back to memories of Iceland, and my experience at the glacial lagoon. After all, there's no place on Earth that I've felt looked more like it was from outer space than that country's beautiful and austere landscape.

Here's that amphibious boat I mentioned.--->
Doesn't it look ready to traverse a lunar landscape, or something??

I'm off to daydream of diamond lagoons,

~Addie~

P.S. If you're interested in this sort of cool spacey stuff, I suggest you check out Astronomy magazine. They're one of the many cool magazines put our by our publishing company. I always love hearing what that staff's up to, and can't help but adore the beautiful imagery that's always printed in their pages. Plus, they've got a blog too.

[ Links via Marginal Revolution ]