In 2022, I was able to visit the excavation site Bilzingsleben, which is mentioned in the article, and can highly recommend a visit to everyone interested in science. The site itself is just a quarry, but they have built a museum right above the place where they found fossils of thousands of creatures. You can then stand over a control table like in the spaceship Enterprise and trigger 3D animations of those animals and humans in their natural environment on a large screen on the wall on other side over an excavation ditch. But the best thing was getting to know to the curator of the site. He himself took part in the excavation, published scientific articles about it and seems to know everything about the site, its excavation history and palaeological topics related to it. I was able to talk with him for more than an hour.
The excavation site is located about 20km north of Erfurt (Thuringia, Germany). In the summer it is open Weddensday to Sunday and on holidays from 10:00 to 17:00. For those with a camper-van: it is no problem to stay in their very quite car park for the night for free. Its Web-site can be found at http://www.steinrinne-bilzingsleben.com/ (in German).
Grube Messel is still on my agenda. (It is literally like this: I have bookmarked the location in my navigator app.) However, from what I heared, both must be quite different. In contrast to Messel, there are no spectacular finds on display in Bilzingsleben. What is associated with Homo Erectus is on display in the Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte in Halle.[1]
The scientific worth of Bilzingsleben is that it is sort of a Homo Erectus version of Pompeji (of a much, much smaller size, though): the place was covered with mud at a certain time during a flood disaster, which hindered decomposition and later errosion. It is now more or less completely excavated. So the site itself is just a big ditch.
As I said, the best thing about my visit was the opportunity to talk with a real expert curator. I have hardly ever met a museum guide who knew so much about his subject matter. I hope he is still there.
In Bucharest we have an entire subway station tiled with marble containing countless very visible fossils [1], specifically of rudists [2]. Here are a few nice photos:
There is a concrete pour next to the place I lived as a child which was done around 1970. A cat walked through and my parents showed the traces to me when I was a small kid, explaining how fossiles were created.
Fast forward 35 years or so, I live 2 km from the place I was born after travelling the world and I went there with my own child to "discover" the steps again, together with the story about fossiles.
I then had my kid take my parents to that place when they were visiting so that he could show them the traces and explain how fossiles are formed.
It’s a heartwarming story, but I don’t understand how cat tracks have anything to do with fossils, which are usually the remains of a once-living animal.
The idea was to explain that one can find traces in stone in the form of imprints. Typically these would be trilobites or shells, but also leaves and actual animal steps.
It was more an introduction to the idea of fossilization, layers of sediments etc. than a university course :) with the general message of "you can find traces of stuff in stones, and next we will crack open a stone to show you that".
Not far away from that place there is a church with steps built from sedimentary stone where there are plenty of fossiles so it was a nice introduction.
Somehow I find marble and travertine in things like hotels a bit depressing. It took millions of years to form and it's a marvel of serendipitous geological processes. Then it gets sliced and stuck to a wall for a decade or two before another renovation or a demolition happens and it gets smashed up and thrown away.
This is what happens to essentially all materials. Metals, Plastics, Oil, Stone, Sand, Concrete all come from things that have been standing mostly still for millions of years before we extracted their components
Some materials are more replaceable than others. A pine wood fixture can be regrown relatively quickly. Even something like oak based furniture can be replaced in a few hundred years.
Heck, even plastic is pretty replaceable as reducing bio-material into plastic isn't unheard of. (The first plastics were made out of casein from milk).
Most iron (and steel) comes from iron ore formations which are at least 1 billion, and up to 3 billion years old: banded iron formations (BIFs).
The oldest of those are literally legacies of the first major burst of biological activity on Earth, which released oxygen into the atmosphere, which for most of a billion of years or so resulted in reducing unoxidized minerals, particularly iron, in the Great Rusting.
Not particularly. Travertine and dolomite limestone are hydrothermal depositions. They form quite rapidly, and in some locations you can watch it being formed to this day, like in some areas of Yellowstone (where the travertine is only a few thousand years old at best.) Dolomite is a little slower than Travertine to grow, but what we now understand about its formation also means it was very likely to have been rapidly-formed by simple geologic acid washes over shorter periods of time than we initially thought - read https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2023/11/27/scienti... and you'll catch on to what I'm saying.
... is that generally true? What are those other applications?
Like, if I want to put in new stone counters, in general I'm picking a kind of stone I like, and the firm measures or makes a template of my use, and cuts from a slab, right? If I have a really small job, perhaps it's possible to get a deal from the offcuts of some prior installation. I don't think it's generally an available option to e.g. get measurements and then peruse a list of countertops removed from recent local renovations where the dimensions are strictly larger than mine, and have my counter cut by trimming their 11' linear counter to my 10' space. But given that widths/depths are often determined by (standard) cabinet or vanity measurements, I feel like this ought to be doable, and these materials could have a straight-forward series of multiple uses.
It kind of feels like at least you "should" stick it to something that you expect will last a substantial amount of time, rather then something that is entirely expected to be gutted in, on the scale of how long a tile could practically last, relatively short order. Obviously, I know that The Market says "no", it's a few dollars a tile wholesale!
Or consider iron. Almost all of it has actually sank into the Earth's core, the deposits we extract it from are but tiniest scraps of the metal left on the face of the planet. So irreverent!
I wonder how they get them off the wall intact? I took up a bathroom floor of (glazed ceramic) tiles and I barely had a piece larger than a handspan to show for it, they were nearly all absolutely welded to the adhesive. Would be great if there could be a 3M Command Strip style pull-to-release tab!
My local grocery store has red marble flooring and one of the tiles has a ~1m diameter perfect ammonite fossil in it. It's huge and I pray they renovate the store one day cause I want to get that tile from the constructors.
Have you ever thought about just asking the owner for it in exchange for paying for a replacement tile and the labor expenses? Maybe they'd be up for it. Seems better than just hoping you notice their plans to renovate in time, or that it doesn't get shattered/damaged.
It's not uncommon to build using human remains or on top of the human remains. Quite a few plague pits got uncovered in London in recent years by developers wanting to build on whatever scrape of land they can find. Developers are required to allow some time for researchers to go through the site before they are free to then pour concrete over them and erect their towers.
Same. I would look at that every time I was in the bathroom and wonder how they died. Did they suffocate from toxic gasses while exploring a cave? Maybe it was more gruesome like falling into a hot spring and getting boiled to death...
This is honestly either shitty workmanship or bad luck. They should have noticed this and swapped it for another tile during construction. Either the installer wasn’t looking at what they were doing (apathy) or there were other tiles with more obvious “flaws” and they ran out of spares.
But then I don’t think I want limestone in my bathroom in the first place.
Amazing... I have this stuff in my own bathroom, and assumed it was some sort of synthetically generated random pattern, e.g. a type of ceramic or concrete tile with coloring swirled in or something. To be honest, I find it a bit ugly and didn't understand why anyone would design a tile to look like this.
Can't wait to get home and actually look carefully. I suspect I'll appreciate it a lot more knowing what it actually is.
Travertine is a pretty “famous” stone and was used extensively by the Romans to build some of their most famous structures (including the Coliseum). Since then architects have used it in many famous buildings (e.g. the Seagram building’s lobby).
Unless you are certain "this stuff in your own bathroom" is real travertine, it most likely is "some sort of synthetically generated random pattern". They make it out of colored cement, which is pretty similar to a real thing, but obviously cheaper and more resistant to some hardships of everyday life.
Readit News
The excavation site is located about 20km north of Erfurt (Thuringia, Germany). In the summer it is open Weddensday to Sunday and on holidays from 10:00 to 17:00. For those with a camper-van: it is no problem to stay in their very quite car park for the night for free. Its Web-site can be found at http://www.steinrinne-bilzingsleben.com/ (in German).
The scientific worth of Bilzingsleben is that it is sort of a Homo Erectus version of Pompeji (of a much, much smaller size, though): the place was covered with mud at a certain time during a flood disaster, which hindered decomposition and later errosion. It is now more or less completely excavated. So the site itself is just a big ditch.
As I said, the best thing about my visit was the opportunity to talk with a real expert curator. I have hardly ever met a museum guide who knew so much about his subject matter. I hope he is still there.
[1] Photos and descriptions of this and a few other nice finds are available online https://nat.museum-digital.de/search?q=Bilzingsleben (texts in German, navigation available in English)
https://www.descopera.ro/wp-content/uploads/media/401/321/59...
https://www.descopera.ro/wp-content/uploads/media/401/321/59...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politehnica_metro_station
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudists
And if I’m not mistaken, several other Italian cities as well.
[1] https://pauls-bologna.blog/dsc08058/
Fast forward 35 years or so, I live 2 km from the place I was born after travelling the world and I went there with my own child to "discover" the steps again, together with the story about fossiles.
I then had my kid take my parents to that place when they were visiting so that he could show them the traces and explain how fossiles are formed.
Full circle of life :)
It was more an introduction to the idea of fossilization, layers of sediments etc. than a university course :) with the general message of "you can find traces of stuff in stones, and next we will crack open a stone to show you that".
Not far away from that place there is a church with steps built from sedimentary stone where there are plenty of fossiles so it was a nice introduction.
Heck, even plastic is pretty replaceable as reducing bio-material into plastic isn't unheard of. (The first plastics were made out of casein from milk).
The oldest of those are literally legacies of the first major burst of biological activity on Earth, which released oxygen into the atmosphere, which for most of a billion of years or so resulted in reducing unoxidized minerals, particularly iron, in the Great Rusting.
It was formed and buried in ways that no one could ever see or appreciate it, until now.
A decade or two in a high visibility location is more attention than it ever would have gotten buried under ground.
Not particularly. Travertine and dolomite limestone are hydrothermal depositions. They form quite rapidly, and in some locations you can watch it being formed to this day, like in some areas of Yellowstone (where the travertine is only a few thousand years old at best.) Dolomite is a little slower than Travertine to grow, but what we now understand about its formation also means it was very likely to have been rapidly-formed by simple geologic acid washes over shorter periods of time than we initially thought - read https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2023/11/27/scienti... and you'll catch on to what I'm saying.
That's sort of material has a high resale value and usually is sold for reuse in other applications.
Like, if I want to put in new stone counters, in general I'm picking a kind of stone I like, and the firm measures or makes a template of my use, and cuts from a slab, right? If I have a really small job, perhaps it's possible to get a deal from the offcuts of some prior installation. I don't think it's generally an available option to e.g. get measurements and then peruse a list of countertops removed from recent local renovations where the dimensions are strictly larger than mine, and have my counter cut by trimming their 11' linear counter to my 10' space. But given that widths/depths are often determined by (standard) cabinet or vanity measurements, I feel like this ought to be doable, and these materials could have a straight-forward series of multiple uses.
Dead Comment
https://www.theonion.com/geologists-we-may-be-slowly-running...
Personally I think of those caves full of ancient crystals, or the stalag[mt]ites in newly unearthed caves. And the lost redwoods.
Wait until you hear what happens to oil...
Rocks brought to the surface, and eroded by water, or plunged into the depths and melted to spew out as volcanoes, etc, etc, etc.
Perhaps the remnants of bathroom tiles will be subjected into the ground and mined in millions of year to decorate a future species bathroom.
It would bother me forever.
But then I don’t think I want limestone in my bathroom in the first place.
Can't wait to get home and actually look carefully. I suspect I'll appreciate it a lot more knowing what it actually is.
Where does the idea that this is a Google-style interview question come from? They've never interviewed that way.
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