Saturday, November 28, 2015

6 Million-Year-Old Growing Rocks That Move

The word trovant is a synonym for the German term “Sandsteinkonkretionen”, which means ‘cemented sand’. That’s what a growing rock is. It grows, moves, even multiplies and the inside of it reveals spherical and ellipsoidal rings which look like the ones of tree trunks. However, this stone is no any kind of a life form. So what is it?

The only place where this geological phenomenon can be seen is a small Romanian village of Consesti. Trovants were spit out during powerful seismic activity which is believed to be around 6 million years old. These weird rocks live on our planet longer than human kind does.

The most interesting fact about these odd stones is that they only grow when water is applied on them. The rocks start their lives as small one-centemeter-long pebbles and can end up to 6-10 meter-long giant. As they get larger, trovants tend to split from their ‘birth mother’ and continue the magical growth process independently. It is assumed that trovants consist of a stone core, with an outer shell of sand.

What is really weird, the sand found in said stones is no any different from an usual sand. So why do they grow? There are many hypothesis like that large amount of minerals in trovants tend expand because of moisture and other factors but none of those presumptions are proved. Yet this really rare phenomenon still keeps one of the most mysterious occurrences in the world of nature.







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