The living stones of Romania (Gemstones)
What is the first thing that comes to your mind in the context of Romania?
Well, if your answer is not casinos, women in prostitution or chowder soup, you probably know that the Eastern European country is known for the variety of rocks it has.
But the one that stands out especially for its rocks is Costesti, a small town north of Bucharest that is known as the home of extremely unique rocks that are hard to find elsewhere.
But these rocks are not only extraordinarily beautiful.
It turns out that they are also able to develop a "life of their own".
They are able to grow and even move just like living creatures, which is why they are entitled to the nickname "living rocks".
There are very few studies on these rocks called trovants in Romanian, but these stones have attracted the attention of many geologists and tourists.
This is how it looks
There is a scientific debate about their origin, but most researchers believe that the tervantes are concretions (a stiff local concentration of a mineral that has accumulated within a soil) of sandstone with hard outer layers of sand, a bit like M&M's.
These concretes are harder than the surrounding rock, so when the surrounding softer rock wears away, they can come out of the ground.
When it rains on the rock, the rainwater creates a chemical reaction with the mineral content of the concretes, causing the material in them to flow out and as a result the rock appears to expand.
Alternatively, it may create large bubble-like growths that almost look like the rock is giving birth to a baby.
More on the subject
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To the full article
Of course, we're talking about geology here, so this all happens really, really slowly.
It is estimated that the rocks "grow" by less than 5 centimeters in 1,200 years.
So don't count on taking pictures of this phenomenon and uploading it to Instagram.
"The travents are basically egg-shaped or ball-shaped, although they may appear in a large variety of shapes," Florin Stoican, co-director of the Buila-Vanturarita National Park, told Radio Romania International.
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"Their history is quite simple - seven million years ago there was a delta where today's stone quarry is located. This delta contained sediments, sandstone and claystone in particular, which were collected and transported from across the continent by a prehistoric river. Then, various mineral materials dissolved into solutions that circulated over a basin This gravel and sand. These minerals acted as cement and stuck together different sediment particles. Today there are travanites with diverse compositions. Some are made of sandstone, others of gravel. In geological terms - they are made of gravel and conglomerates (talc - a type of sedimentary rock consisting of rounded rock fragments joined together) ", she explained.
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