The lilliputian town of Nördlingen , in the German state of Bavaria , has a quaint kind of storybook appeal about it . But what ’s hiding in the village ’s building and grounding might make it one of the glitziest places on Earth : Nördlingen is bejeweled with the equivalent of 72,000 tons of diamonds , allot toSmithsonian .
The diamond , which are strew throughout Nördlingen , are n’t just any gemstones either ; they formed rough 15 million years ago , when an asteroid journey at a speed of approximately 15.5 mi per secondstruckthe Earth . Geologists forecast that the space rock and roll measured about one klick spacious ( the same size of it as modern - day Nördlingen ) and weighed close to 3 billion tons . Upon make contact , it create vivid warmth and insistence — enough to bring forth a coarse - grained rock calledsuevite , which consists of glass , crystals , and diamonds .
When settlers arrived at the site millions of years subsequently in 898 CE , they had no melodic theme they were ramp up their homes and businesses on land that had the highest diamond concentration of any office on Earth , as the diamond scattered throughout the arena were too small-scale to see with the bare heart . For years , Nördlingen locals assume the crater ’s origin was volcanic . It was n’t until the 1960s that it was confirmed to have come from an asteroid .
Not knowing any better , residents used the suevite as a building material to manufacture their town . As a resultant , many of Nördlingen ’s most famous structures — include St. George ’s Church and a protective border wall leftover from the Middle Ages — have a high carat time value .
Today , house physician of Nördlingen know they ’re living atop tons of diamonds , but they ’re not about to tear asunder their town to sell off the materials . The diamonds in suevite are midget — less than 0.2 millimeter across — and are therefore much unworthy , even in such high density . But the German town has find unlike ways to profit from their strange claim to renown . Tourists come from around the world to appreciate Nördlingen ’s glimmering computer architecture and tour theRies Crater Museum , which displays local sample and those from other craters around the world .
[ h / tSmithsonian ]
