Short Stuff: Trovants

Rocks that grow baby rocks – wut?! See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 0:39Josh Clark?

  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 Trovants or Trovants or Trovants.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  I bet it's Trovants. I don't know why I didn't look it up, but I'm going to go with that.

• 0:54Josh Clark?

  It's gotta 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.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14Josh Clark?

  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, they're going to, they're going to kill you and your entire family if, if given the chance.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, they have babies.

• 1:33Josh Clark?

  Yeah, yeah. It's amazing. Do you look up some of the pictures of them?

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're awesome. They're, 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?

• 2:09Josh Clark?

  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.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  That's right. When they started getting serious and were like, "Guys, can we move past alien pods and dinosaur eggs and really try and figure this out?"

• 2:30Josh Clark?

  I took it to be alien pods is what people are saying on the internet now.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Well, probably so, because that's where all that stuff takes place. But when they finally got serious, they were like, "You know what's going on here? This is a concretion." And a concretion is something that starts out as a little pebble or something, or a leaf, maybe, and then starts getting depositions, maybe sandstone, other kinds of grit and minerals washed along a river, just building up and sort of cementing, almost like a snowball rolling downhill. That is a concretion.

• 3:02Josh Clark?

  Yes. And in Oslo in 2008, the International Geological Conference Congress...

• 3:09Speaker 02

  Man.

• 3:10Josh Clark?

  Said, "Oh, no."

• 3:11Speaker 02

  The parties at that place.

• 3:12Josh Clark?

  Yeah. That's the rocks that they were doing, I'm sure.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:17Josh Clark?

  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.

• 4:00Josh Clark?

  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."

• 4:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. And they closed that session of the International Geological Congress in Oslo by chanting, "Open bar, open bar."

• 4:26Speaker 02

  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 a kind of a slurry solution, like you said, of mainly calcium carbonate. Along with calcium carbonate, you can also get sandstone from iron oxide in quartz. But in this case, the sandstone is calcium carbonate.

• 4:51Josh Clark?

  Yeah, precisely. And so they figured out, okay, some sort of compression took place. The force of gravity kind of pushed these things together. And then apparently they were like even more pushed together by earthquakes that took place back in, I think, the middle Mayocene sub-epoch, which as everyone knows is about 5.3 million years ago. And they smooshed the sandstone together. And if you look at a lot of the Trovants, especially the parts that are coming out of the ground, yeah, it just looks like a smooshed normal rock, right? Like, pretty large, but it doesn't, it doesn't look weird. What makes

• 5:30Josh Clark?

  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.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Let's do it.

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• 7:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  And that's when people are like, look, it had a little rock baby.

• 8:11Josh Clark?

  It had a baby. 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 Trovants grow, right?

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the deposition rate is about an inch and a half, maybe a couple of inches every. Year? No. Every hundred years? No. Every 500 years?

• 8:51Josh Clark?

  No.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Every thousand years?

• 8:53Josh Clark?

  Yes.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. So an inch and a half to two inches every 1,000 years. That has not stopped certain patient people from sitting there and looking at them from a long time though, right?

• 9:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure. There's one researcher who said that they filmed Travance for two weeks. And said that not, not that they were growing, but that they were moving. This is another thing about it too. People say these rocks move. And again, this is in Romania, in the Carpathian region. People have lived there for a really long time. They've lived around these rocks for a really long time. They've been observing them for a really long time. So you can't exactly poo poo some of the things that they've observed about these very special rocks.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:32Josh Clark?

  And apparently walking or moving is, is part of them. So this researcher went and said, "I filmed this thing moving a tenth of an inch, two and a half millimeters in two weeks." And don't ask me for the film or any follow up question.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. He's like, "So what do you think of that?" And everyone's like, "Oh, boy." This guy, does he not know there's an open bar in the back?

• 9:56Josh Clark?

  Right. So the thing is, they're not discounting it fully that these things can move, but the rocks wouldn't be moving. Say like, the heating and cooling of the soil could cause some sort of movement of the rocks, moving them along. And there are rocks that, that move. They don't move by their own locomotion. There's not a rock in the world that moves by itself. Even if it's rolling downhill, it's, it's under the force of gravity. But there are rocks in, oh, Death Valley, I think, the Sailing Stones. Have you seen them?

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. I feel like we talked about those in a video. It sounded familiar, or maybe I just had heard of them.

• 10:32Josh Clark?

  But they, they leave a track behind them. They are definitely moving.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:38Josh Clark?

  And they're too big for a human to push as like a prank or a joke like the crop circles were. And they figured out that the very thin layers of ice form on the floor of Death Valley sometimes. And as it, as it melts, it breaks into little sheets that actually kind of move the rocks along for distances.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Amazing. Another pretty cool thing that they found out at, in Oslo, where else?

• 11:04Speaker 02

  Is they're like, hey, how do we explain the fact that we have found these fossils in here, though, these marine fossils? There's bivalves in here, there's gastropod fossils sometimes. And they said, well, the best we can come up with, and this makes total sense, is that the area where they're found used to be an ancient marine environment, because they're finding those fossils in there. And also, that calcium carbonate, and we've kind of been holding on to this till the end, that is the essential ingredient in marine shells. So it seems pretty clear it was probably a marine environment in ancient times.

• 11:34Josh Clark?

  Boom.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Pretty great.

• 11:37Josh Clark?

  That was the fact of the podcast.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. And there, most of them are found at just, not even just Romania, but this one sand quarry, right?

• 11:45Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I've seen both. I've seen them that they, you can find them around the Carpathia region, but there's definitely a huge population of them in what's now the Trovants Museum Natural Reserve in Valsia County, Romania. And there's a village in particular, Otasani Village, which is very well known for it. So much so that I think that's where the idea that they can only be found there comes from. But there's still, I mean, you're not going to find them in like Peru or Zimbabwe or something like that. They're just in this very limited area of the world in Romania.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  That's right. So shout out to the Otasani Village. And the other one is the Costesti Village.

• 12:25Josh Clark?

  Very nice, Chuck. And I guess, since I said very nice, I don't have anything else, do you?

• 12:31Speaker 02

  No, we should just let people know they're protected. Like, so you can't go and break them and run off with them. UNESCO is protecting these things now.

• 12:38Josh Clark?

  Do not do that.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, don't do that.

• 12:41Josh Clark?

  Leave nature alone.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. But I have nothing else aside from that.

• 12:46Josh Clark?

  Okay, short stuff is out.