They can be cut to shape, if a mistake was made during this process then I guess it would be destroyed. Also I'm sure i read somewhere that if they are hit hard enough in the right place they will shatter.

Erm, I'm pretty sure if you drop a diamond into liquid oxygen it will dissolve or burn up... sufficed to say there will be no diamond when finished. some nutter has found a way of turning this into carbonated water ! seems a bit osf a waste of a diamond to me !! perhaps the favorite drink of the Sultan of Brunai or other stupidly rich people ! http://dreammaui.com/diamondwater.html :o) Hope that helped

The fires of Mordor.

extreme heat will destroy a diamond

Diamonds can be burnt, and they can be crushed. They can be cut by appropriately placed impacts, and can be polished by other diamonds. Anything can be destroyed by enough force, especially something much, much bigger. Diamonds are just the hardest substance i.e. very strong /for their size and weight/.

This $2.99 hammer. Ask any woman with a small child and what used to be a complete set of earrings.

Actually diamonds are quite brittle. They're very hard, but that just means they're hard to bend or scratch.

"Fusibility: Burns above 800°C, on heating over 2000 Celsius decomposes in solid state without melting. Solubility: Resistant to acids, but dissolves irreversibly in hot steel" "Known to the ancient Greeks as adamas ("tame'sles" or "bridleless") and sometimes called adamant, diamond is the hardest known naturally occurring material, scoring 10 on the old Mohs scale of mineral hardness." "Cubic diamonds have a perfect and easy octahedral cleavage, which means that they have four planes—directions following the faces of the octahedron where there are fewer bonds and therefore points of structural weakness—along which diamond can easily split (following a blunt impact), leaving smooth surfaces. Similarly, diamond's hardness is markedly directional: the hardest direction is the diagonal on the cube face, 100 times harder than the softest direction, which is the dodecahedral plane. The octahedral plane, followed by the axial directions on the cube plane, are intermediate between the two extremes. The diamond cutting process relies heavily on this directional hardness, as without it a diamond would be nearly impossible to fashion. Cleavage also plays a helpful role, especially in large stones where the cutter wishes to remove flawed material or to produce more than one stone from the same piece of rough." "Unlike hardness, which only denotes resistance to scratching, diamond's toughness or tenacity is only fair to good. Toughness relates to the ability to resist breakage from falls or impacts: due to diamond's perfect and easy cleavage, it is vulnerable to breakage. A diamond will shatter if hit with an ordinary hammer." Source and further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_properties_of_diamond

my ex wife went thru them like candy ha