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Chapter 1: Who are the hosts introducing the topic of Trovants?
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here sitting in for Dave. And this is short stuff about Trovance or Trovance or Trovance.
I bet it's Trovante. I don't know why I didn't look it up, but I'm going to go with that.
Chapter 2: What are Trovants and why are they mysterious rocks?
It's got to be. It doesn't matter. No one knows how to pronounce it. No one outside of Romania. And the reason I just mentioned Romania is because in the Carpathian area of Romania, there's a specific kind of rock that has captured the imagination of any human who's seen it because they are very weird looking.
Yeah.
In fact, they look like they're growing smaller rocks out of the bigger rocks. Not supposed to happen to anybody outside of the field of geology, but they are. And so some people are like, these rocks are living. They move around. They're going to kill you and your entire family if given the chance.
Yeah. They have babies.
Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing.
Do you look up some of the pictures of them? Yeah, they're awesome. They're pretty smooth looking. They're lumpy. Yeah. It looks, you know, look up a picture of these things, you know, not if you're driving, obviously, but so you can get it in your mind's eye. They can be they can be little.
They can be smaller than an inch and just weigh a few grams or they can be very, very large, like boulder-esque, like 15 feet high, several tons in weight. And people since the 18th century have been like, what are these things? They look like dinosaur eggs or alien pods. What's happening here?
Yeah. And they were wrong on both accounts. They really are rocks. They do grow. They do kind of calve off baby rocks. But they're not alive in any sense that we understand it. They're rocks.
That's right. When they started getting serious and we're like, guys, can we move past alien pods and dinosaur eggs and really try and figure this out?
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Chapter 3: How do Trovants differ from typical concretions?
So it's made up of a bunch of different stuff. Turns out trovants are made entirely of sandstone. And in particular, they're made of calcium carbonate sandstone. So they're like, these are not concretions. What are they? We're not entirely certain, but we're going to take a stab at explaining them.
Right.
And they all got busy. So they, in Oslo, they hypothesize that the minerals were carried by a prehistoric river along these little sandy sediments and formed kind of a slurry solution, like you said, of mainly calcium carbonate. Along with calcium carbonate, you can also get sandstone from iron oxide and quartz. But in this case, the sandstone is calcium carbonate.
Yeah, precisely. And so they figured out, OK, some sort of compression took place. The force of gravity can push these things together. And then apparently they were like even more pushed together by earthquakes that took place back in, I think, the middle Miocene sub epoch, which, as everyone knows, is about five point three million years ago. And they smushed the sandstone together.
And if you look at a lot of the Trovans, especially the parts that are coming out of the ground, yeah, it just looks like a smushed normal rock, right? Like pretty large, but it doesn't look weird. What makes it look weird is the spherical shaped rocks growing out of the other rocks. And that actually has to do with the way that these rocks actually grow.
And I say, Chuck, we take a break and we come back and talk about how they grow after this. Let's do it.
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Chapter 4: What scientific hypotheses explain the formation of Trovants?
Chapter 5: What role did the 2008 International Geological Conference play in understanding Trovants?
The parties at that place. Yeah. That's the rocks that they were doing, I'm sure. Yeah. And they said, no, we don't think it's a concretion at all. I don't know who they were scolding because I'm sure all the members were the ones who came up with the idea that it was a concretion. But they said, no, this is different than that. A concretion is a rock where you have a nucleus.
And then over time, sediments are deposited over it and it grows and grows and grows. It's understandable why people said that trovants were concretions for a very long time. But then somebody thought to cut one open. And when they did, they said there's no nucleus here. And with a typical concretion rock, the sediments are whatever got attracted to it.
So it's made up of a bunch of different stuff. Turns out trovants are made entirely of sandstone. And in particular, they're made of calcium carbonate sandstone. So they're like, these are not concretions. What are they? We're not entirely certain, but we're going to take a stab at explaining them.
Right.
And they all got busy. So they, in Oslo, they hypothesize that the minerals were carried by a prehistoric river along these little sandy sediments and formed kind of a slurry solution, like you said, of mainly calcium carbonate. Along with calcium carbonate, you can also get sandstone from iron oxide and quartz. But in this case, the sandstone is calcium carbonate.
Yeah, precisely. And so they figured out, OK, some sort of compression took place. The force of gravity can push these things together. And then apparently they were like even more pushed together by earthquakes that took place back in, I think, the middle Miocene sub epoch, which, as everyone knows, is about five point three million years ago. And they smushed the sandstone together.
And if you look at a lot of the Trovans, especially the parts that are coming out of the ground, yeah, it just looks like a smushed normal rock, right? Like pretty large, but it doesn't look weird. What makes it look weird is the spherical shaped rocks growing out of the other rocks. And that actually has to do with the way that these rocks actually grow.
And I say, Chuck, we take a break and we come back and talk about how they grow after this. Let's do it.
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Chapter 6: How do Trovants grow and what causes their unique shapes?
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So another little oddity here we have to talk about is the fact that these things secrete cement. And this is sort of what lends people to think like these things are alive. It's after a big rain. They will absorb the minerals from that rain. And then those minerals come in contact with the chemicals that are already in that stone, that calcium carbonate and the other stuff.
And there's a pressurized reaction that makes the rock grow. It grows in girth. And that sandstone is very porous. And so it's those places in between. It's not happening like the whole thing's not growing at once. It'll be like a little pocket where this stuff, you know, gets lodged and expands. And then it literally grows off little pieces and they can fall off.
And that's when people are like, look, it had a little rock baby.
It had a baby. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, that's it. That's how they grow rocks, a chemical reaction that creates pressure in the rock that's so strong and they're so porous that it can actually bubble up. And then over time, as it grows and grows and grows, it can take on a spherical shape. Right. So that's pretty amazing.
What would be more amazing is if you could see this happen in real time, but you can't because the human lifespan is fairly short compared to how long it would take to watch a trovant grow. Right.
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