As someone who focuses on building stone and the use of stone in non-natural situations, it was a pleasure to read about Ian’s Accretionary Wedge #42. He asks “Have you seen a great countertop out there?  Sure, everyone says it’s “granite”, but you know better.  Take a picture, post it on your own blog or send it to me and I’ll post it for you.  Do you think you know what it is or how it was formed?  Feel free to include your own interpretation and I’m sure others will enjoy joining in the discussion.”

He raises a good point that in the countertop trade rocks seem to come in just two varieties: marble and granite. If it looks granular or granitic, it is a granite. If it looks marbled or veiny, it is a marble. One of the few places that I have seen another type of stone mentioned was in Bloomington, Indiana, where I saw an add for apartments that included limestone countertops. This makes sense because of the location, in the heart of the Indiana stone belt.

Trying to choose one favorite countertop or other human-manipulated stone is a challenge. I have written about some of my favorites, the wonderful treestump gravestones of Indiana, but thought I would turn to another rather unusual stone structure. I have never seen it but have read about it. It is William Buckland’s Coprolite Table on display at the Lyme Regis Museum. That site contains a link to nifty, in-depth article about the table. Here’s a quick summary.

Both photographs from Richard Bull’s fine paper on the table.

Reverend William Buckland was an eccentric Oxford geologist who coined the term “coprolite,” meaning “dung-stone,” in 1829. The table was made from coprolites most likely collected at Wardie, Edinburgh, in 1834. It was on display in his drawing rooms he had a two homes. Making up the surface of the table are “64 sectioned oval coprolitic nodules,” which closely resemble beetles but are in fact fish poops. They come from a 330-million-year old shale deposited in a freshwater lake.

In 1836, Buckland wrote about the coprolites in his famous Bridgewater Treatise:

Mr W C Trevelyan recognised Coprolites in the centre of nodules of clay ironstone, that he found in a low cliff composed of shale, belonging to the coal formation at Newhaven, near Leith. I visited the spot, with this gentleman and Lord Greenock, in September 1834 and found these nodules stewed so thickly upon the shore, that a few minutes allowed me to collect more specimens than I could carry. Many of these contained a fossil fish, or a fragment of a plant, but the greater number had at their nucleus, a Coprolite, exhibiting an internal spiral structure: they were probably derived from voracious fishes, whose bones are found in the same stratum. These nodules take a beautiful polish, and have been applied by the lapidaries of Edinburgh to make tables, letter presses, and ladies ornaments under the name of Beetle stones from their supposed insect origin.

The Lyme Regis Museum acquired the table in 1928 as a gift from Buckland’s grandson.

So, the Brits finally fessed up that indeed they did plant a fake rock in a park outside of Moscow to spy on Russia. The story first arose in 2006 when Russian Intelligence claimed that British diplomats had used the rock to download and transmit information about Russian NGOs, or Non-Governmental Organizations. At the time, the British government denied any knowledge of the rock or the spying.

But on Thursday, in a BBC documentary, Jonathan Powell, who in 2006 was Chief of Staff for Prime Minister Tony Blair, admitted that “they had us bang to rights.” (For those unfamiliar with this phrase, it means caught red-handed. There appears to be some dispute as to whether it is of British or American origin.) Powell added that “Clearly they had known about it for some time and had been saving it up for a political purpose.”

That purpose appears to be Putin’s clamping down on NGOs. Supposedly, the British were funding NGOs that sought to promote democracy and human rights. An article in yesterday’s Guardian newspaper quoted human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov. “For any thinking person this rock meant nothing – it was simply a provocation, a cheap trick used by a former KGB agent.” The British continue to deny that the had illegally funded any NGOs.

Curiously, the Russians have long been known to use such fake rocks themselves. In an interview on C-Span in 2000, author David Wise described how double-agent Joe Cassidy used fake rocks for Russian spy drops in the 1960s and 1970s.

Sergeant Cassidy made one for me o–out of papier-mache. He
 showed me how it’s done. And it looks absolutely realistic. Then he
 would roll it in the dirt to–to look like a rock, to pick up some 
dirt. And it was kind of gray looking to begin with. And the inside 
would be completely hollow. And in there, he would have some
ti–ordinary tinfoil that you would buy at the supermarket.

And inside the tinfoil, he would wrap the film of the documents he had
secretly photographed on behalf of the Russians. All was under the
control of the FBI and the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. The
 Russians would then pick up this–this–these films and they would 
develop them and they would think they had the secret documents.

In regard to the modern rock, my big question is whether it looked authentic or not. I think that it does. The rock looks like sandstone or limestone and Moscow is known to have subsurface karst limestone. So, I like to think that even if the Brits made what some call an embarrassing choice by using the rock and then denying it, they at least may have gone to the effort to choose a geologically appropriate rock.

One hundred years ago, Roald Amundsen and four men didn’t reach the South Pole. They came close. The spot where they left a tent with notes to Robert Scott and a letter for King Haakon VII of Norway was less than two miles from the pole but it is not clear if they actually crossed that mythic spot of 90 degrees South.

I am certainly no expert on this subject. My posting derives from an article written as part of the run up to the centenary of Amundsen and Scott’s great race: “The present location of the tent that Roald Amundsen left behind at the South Pole in December 1911,” by Olav Orheim. It was published in the Polar Record, Vol. 47, No. 242, 2011.

On December 14, 1911, Amundsen wrote in his journal, “So, we arrived, and were able to raise our flag at the geographical South Pole…Naturally we are not exactly at the point called 90°, but after all our excellent observations and dead reckonings we must be very close.” For the next three days, Amundsen and his men took regular readings to determine their location. They also skied methodically around the spot to ensure that someone crossed the mythic point of 90 degrees south. Amundsen’s journal for December 18 reads, “It is very difficult to arrive at a definitive result. But we can say with certainty that we are south of 89°59’.”

So where did they end up? Orheim refers to two previous calculations in his paper. Anton Alexander, an expert on maritime navigation for the Norwegian Hydrographic Service, published information in Amundsen’s account of his trek (1913). He wrote that on December 14, the five men were at 89°53’50’ S, 103°E, and on December 17, at the spot where they erected their tent, they had reached 89°58’30” S, 60° E. Maximum error was 3 kilometers. Orheim also referenced an article by Arthur R. Hinks in from The Geographical Journal, Vol. 103, No. 4, April 44, “The Observations of Amundsen and Scott and the South pole.” Hinks placed the tent slightly closer, at 89°58’45” S, 71°36’ E. Maximum error was .32 km.

Orheim’s goal was not to determine where Amundsen had been but where his tent now was. He based his analysis on GPS data, which shows that the glacier located under the Amundsen-South Pole Station is moving at a rate of 9.98 meters per year along the 40°46’56” west longitudinal meridian. This places the tent about 170 meters closer to the pole at 89°58’51” S, 46°14’ E.

He also looks at how snow has buried Amundsen’s tent. Based on two different averages, as well a compaction factor, he concludes that it now lies under 17 meters of accumulated snow and ice. He concludes that it will probably never be seen again.

I am not trying to cast aspersions on Amundsen and his men and his dogs. What they did was incredible and they may in fact have crossed over the pole at some point during their three day of skiing and observing. Mostly I wanted to try and find a way to mention Orheim’s work, which I think is pretty darned nifty.

 

Just came across a wonderful posting about building stone in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. It is written by Gerard Middleton, a retired sedimentologist, who taught at McMaster University in Hamilton for 41 years. Since retiring he has devoted himself to the history of geology and in particular to knitting together the stories of stone in Hamilton. He got his start when approached by the people developing “Ruthven,” an old stone mansion on the banks of the Grand River, near Cayuga in southern Ontario. They wanted help identifying the source of the stone. This proved so interesting that he began to investigate all of the stone in buildings within a day’s drive from Hamilton.

Since then Gerard has given talks about his work and started to publish his findings. This includes cowriting a guidebook, Niagara Rocks, Building Stone, History and Wine, and helping Nina Perksins Chapple on her A Heritage in Stone: Buildings of the Niagara Peninsula, Fergus and Elora, Guelph, Region of Waterloo, Cambridge, Paris, Ancaster-Dundas-Flamborough, Hamilton and St. Mary’s. In all of his work, he does a fine job of describing the history and geology, making each accessible to non-specialists.

I look forward to more of Gerard’s splendid studies of building stone.

 

Stone or Rock? Is there a difference? Working on my new book has forced me to consider this question and its implications. Throughout the book, I use the terms interchangeably, based mostly on how they sound or how frequently I used one or the other.

When I did a bit of searching on the web, I found that some people thought that stone was more British; that rock could be hard and soft, whereas stone was always hard; that stones are smooth and rocks rough; and that stones are small and rocks are big. In his wonderful book, Stone by Stone, Robert Thorson writes “Rock is raw material in situ. Stone usually connotes either human handling or human use, although it can also be used to describe naturally produced fragments of rock larger than a cobble.”

Seeking a more erudite source, I turned to one of my favorite books, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), to get the fine opinion of its worthy editors. The first definition for rock is “A large rugged mass of hard mineral material or stone.” Its first use comes from Old English, dated at 950-1100. The OED defines stone as “A piece of rock or hard mineral substance of a small or moderate size,” first used in 825. Now, I see the difference!

Curiously, the word stonerock, defined as “A pointed or projecting rock, a peak, a crag; a detached mass of rock, a boulder or large stone,” predates either of the singular words stone or rock. Stonerock, or stanrocces, as it was spelled, dates from the Early Old English, used from 600 to 950. I am not sure that this clarifies my quest but as is the norm for the OED, I got sucked into the many definitions and uses, which run to three pages for rock, including rock nosing, rockchuck, and rock-embosomed; and four and a half for stone, with such nifty combinations as stone harmonicon, stone-pock, and stone-toter.

Perhaps I could find a bit of clarity from on high. In the King James Bible, stone and rock seemed interchangeable, such as in Genesis 31:46, where we read of Jacob telling his brethren to “Gather stones; and they took stones, and made an heap.” (Now why they didn’t just say cairn here is beyond me!) But there are two situations where stone and rock cannot be substituted for one another. The first is the surprisingly common pastime (at least a dozen times) where somebody must “stone them/him/her with stones.” You can “stone them with rocks” but no matter how tin your ear is you cannot “rock them with rocks,” which allows for the introduction of this silly phrase: you can, at least since the 1960s, “rock them with The Stones.”

More common than death by stone is the affirmation of a Holy Being as the “rock of one’s salvation.” This sense highlights a central difference between the words. People often use rock to refer to something solid, large, grounded, substantial, something to base your faith upon, such as a mountain or palisade. No one would say the “stone of one’s salvation.” Stone, while connoting a hard mineral substance, favors smaller objects, such as something you can pick up in your hands, for example, the stones for the heap gathered by Jacob’s pals.

Seeking out an even higher authority I turned to Shakespeare. He also incorporated stone and rock into his writings, more than 115 times and 50 times, respectively (which includes the plural forms.) One of his most famous uses comes from As You Like It, in the banished Duke’s ode to a new forested life “And this our life exempt from public haunt/Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,/Sermons in stones and good in every thing.” Clearly the Bard chose stone for the alliteration and sound, as he did in Titus Andronicus, where the title character states “A stone is soft as wax,—tribunes more hard than stones; A stone is silent, and offendeth not.” (One of my favorite poets, Robinson Jeffers, refers to the “insolent quietness of stone.”)

Shakespeare’s use of rock was often specific to the sea, as something to fear. “Rocks threaten us with wreck.” “And then there is the peril of waters, winds and rocks.” “Alas, the sea hath cast me on the rocks.” No one, especially one with Shakespeare’s gifts, would substitute stone in these situations. Again, his use of rock reflects the idea that rock refers to massive, immovable matter, though this idea does not limit rock to this definition.

I cannot end my consideration of these two terms without turning to one final source of inspiration, that of big time wrestling, or “rassling,” as one former National Park superintendent called it. I refer to the two icons of that theater, The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin. Surely these two men illustrate the differences between the two words.

Ultimately, I have concluded that there is some difference between the terms. I agree with Thorson that stone more often implies some sort of human use. Stone also does seem restricted to smaller material. But rock can also be used in these situations. In this sense all rocks are stones but not all stones are rocks. Clear as mud.