![]() ![]() " There are big banks of this coral, it is porous and so hard or yet as smooth as the upright, which grows in small branches. Strachan, who in 1704 submitted to the Royal Society in London a three pages paper speculating about the formation of these structures: One of the earliest descriptions of coral reefs comes from a certain Mr. Here apparently gigantic mountains of limestone were formed below the surface of the sea - but how exactly and how could these mountains raise from the bottom of the sea and form one of the most intriguing landscapes in the world? Jthe explorer James Cook discovered, not entirely voluntarily (the " HMS Endeavour" collided with it), one of the largest bioconstructions on planet earth - the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. Fossils provided clues that the rocks composing the mountains were formed once in the sea by living organisms, but in these early days of geology almost nothing was known about the bottom of the sea and the sedimentation occurring in oceans.įig.1. In the 19th century the genesis of the Dolomite Mountains was one of the great geological mysteries. Three years later the naturalist Richard Kirman introduced the Dolomite as a new mineral the name from there became used to name the dolostone rocks and finally gave the Dolomites - referred in the past simply as the " Pale Mountains" - their actual name. The white rock was very similar to common limestone, but the mineral grains forming the unusual rock showed almost no reaction with acids, unlike crystals of calcite or aragonite (the main minerals of limestone), which react violently. In July 1791 the French aristocrat, adventurer and naturalist Diedonnè-Silvain-Guy-Tancrede de Gvalet de Dolomieu published a short article describing a peculiar limestone he had observed during a voyage in the Alps. Our planet is graced by life and one quality that sets life apart is it's complexity."Ĭarl Sagan in " Cosmos - The Persistence of Memory" " The surface of the earth is far more beautiful and far more intricate than any lifeless world.
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