Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
Speaker 1: there's Chuck and Jerry's here sitting in for Dave. And
Speaker 1: this is short stuff about trovants or trovins or droving.
Speaker 2: I bet it's travant. I don't know why I didn't
Speaker 2: look it up, but I'm gonna go with that.
Speaker 1: It's gotta be. It doesn't matter. No one knows how
Speaker 1: to pronounce it, no one outside of Romania. And the
Speaker 1: reason I just mentioned Romania is because in the Carpathian
Speaker 1: area of Romania, there's a specific kind of rock that
Speaker 1: has captured the imagination of any human who's seen it
Speaker 1: because they are very weird looking.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: In fact, they look like they're growing smaller rocks out
Speaker 1: of the bigger rocks. Not supposed to happen to anybody
Speaker 1: outside of the field of geology, but they are. And
Speaker 1: so some people are like, these rocks are living, they
Speaker 1: move around, they're gonna they're gonna kill you and your
Speaker 1: entire family if if given the chance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they have babies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, it's amazing. Did you look up some of
Speaker 1: the pictures of them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're awesome. They're pretty smooth looking, they're lumpy. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it looks you know, look up a picture of these things.
Speaker 2: You know, not if you're driving, obviously, but so you
Speaker 2: can get it in your mind's eye. They can be little.
Speaker 2: They can be smaller than an inch and just way
Speaker 2: a few grams, or they can be very very large,
Speaker 2: like boulder esque, like fifteen feet high, several tons in weight.
Speaker 2: And people since the eighteenth century have been like, what
Speaker 2: are these things? They look like dinosaur eggs or alien pods?
Speaker 2: What's happening here?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And they were wrong on both accounts. They really
Speaker 1: are rocks. They do grow, they do kind of calve
Speaker 1: off baby rocks, but they're not alive in any sense
Speaker 1: that we understand it. They're rocks.
Speaker 2: That's right. When they started getting serious and we're like, guys,
Speaker 2: can we move past alien pods and dinosaur eggs and
Speaker 2: really try and figure this out.
Speaker 1: I took it to be alien pods, is what people
Speaker 1: are saying on the internet now.
Speaker 2: Well, probably so, because that's where all that stuff takes place.
Speaker 2: But when they finally got serious, they were like, you know,
Speaker 2: what's going on here. This is a concretion, And a
Speaker 2: concretion is something that starts out as a little pebble
Speaker 2: or something or a leaf maybe, and then starts getting
Speaker 2: depositions maybe sandstone, other kinds of grit and minerals washed
Speaker 2: along a river, just building up and sort of cementing,
Speaker 2: almost like a snowball rolling downhill. That is a concretion, yes.
Speaker 1: And in Oslo in two thousand and eight, the International
Speaker 1: Geological Conference congress.
Speaker 2: Man to that place.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the rocks that they were doing, I'm sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: and they said, no, we don't think it's a concretion
Speaker 1: at all. I don't know who they were scolding, because
Speaker 1: I'm sure all the members were the ones who came
Speaker 1: up with the idea that it was a concretion. But
Speaker 1: they said, no, this is different than that. A concretion
Speaker 1: is a rock where you have a nucleus and then
Speaker 1: over time sediments are deposited over it and it grows
Speaker 1: and grows and grows. It's understandable why people said that
Speaker 1: trovants were concretions for a very long time. But then
Speaker 1: somebody thought to cut one open, and when they did,
Speaker 1: they said, there's no nucleus here. And with a typical
Speaker 1: concretion rock, the sediments are whatever got attracted to it,
Speaker 1: so it's made up of a bunch of different stuff.
Speaker 1: Turns out trovants are made entirely of sandstone, and in
Speaker 1: particular they're made of calcium carbonate sandstone. So they're like,
Speaker 1: these are not concretions. What are they? We're not entirely certain,
Speaker 1: but we're going to take a stab at explaining them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And they closed that session of the International Geological
Speaker 2: Congress and Oslo by chanting open bar, open bar, and.
Speaker 1: They all got busy.
Speaker 2: So they in Oslo they hypothesize that the minerals were
Speaker 2: carried by a prehistoric river along these little sandy sediments
Speaker 2: and formed a kind of a slurry solution, like you said,
Speaker 2: of mainly calcium carbonate. Along with calcium carbonate, you can
Speaker 2: also get sandstone from iron oxide and quartz, but in
Speaker 2: this case the sandstone is calcium carbonate.
Speaker 1: Yeah, precisely. And so they figured out, okay, some sort
Speaker 1: of compression took place, the force of gravity kind of
Speaker 1: pushed these things together. And then apparently they were like
Speaker 1: even more pushed together by earthquakes that took place back
Speaker 1: in I think the Middle Miocene sub epoch, which as
Speaker 1: everyone knows, is about five point three million years ago,
Speaker 1: and they smushed the sandstone together. And if you look
Speaker 1: at a lot of the trovons, especially the parts that
Speaker 1: are coming out of the ground. Yeah, it just looks
Speaker 1: like a smushed normal rock, right, like pretty large. But
Speaker 1: it doesn't it doesn't look weird. What makes it look
Speaker 1: weird is the spherical shape rocks growing out of the
Speaker 1: other rocks. And that actually has to do with the
Speaker 1: way that these rocks actually grow. And I say, Chuck,
Speaker 1: we take a break and we come back and talk
Speaker 1: about how they grow after this.
Speaker 2: Let's do it. So another little oddity here we have
Speaker 2: to talk about is the fact that these things secrete cement.
Speaker 2: And this is sort of what lends people to think
Speaker 2: like these things are alive. It's after a big rain.
Speaker 2: They will absorb the minerals from that rain, and then
Speaker 2: those minerals come in contact with the chemicals that are
Speaker 2: already in that stone, that that calcium carbonate and the
Speaker 2: other stuff, and there's a pressurized reaction that makes the
Speaker 2: rock grow. It grows in girth, and that sandstone is
Speaker 2: very porous, and so it's those places in between it's
Speaker 2: not happening, like the whole thing's not growing at once.
Speaker 2: It'll be like a little pocket where this stuff, you know,
Speaker 2: gets lodged and expands, and then it literally grows off
Speaker 2: little pieces and they can fall off. And that's when
Speaker 2: people are like, look, it had a little rock.
Speaker 1: Baby, It had a baby. Yeah, So I mean that's it.
Speaker 1: That's how they grow rocks. A chemical reaction that creates
Speaker 1: pressure in the rock that's so strong and they're so
Speaker 1: porous that it can actually bubble up, and then over time,
Speaker 1: as it grows and grows and grows, it can take
Speaker 1: on a spherical shape. Right, So that's pretty amazing. What
Speaker 1: would be more amazing is if you could see this
Speaker 1: happen in real time, but you can't because the human
Speaker 1: lifespan is fairly short compared to how long it would
Speaker 1: take to watch a trovont grow.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, I think the deposition rate is about an
Speaker 2: inch and a half maybe a couple inches every year. No,
Speaker 2: every hundred years, no, every five hundred years, no, every
Speaker 2: thousand years. Yes, yeah, so an inch and a half
Speaker 2: to two inches every one thousand years. That has not
Speaker 2: stopped certain patient people from sitting there and looking at
Speaker 2: them from a long time.
Speaker 1: Though, right, Yeah, for sure. There was one researcher who
Speaker 1: said that they filmed travants for two weeks and said
Speaker 1: that not that they were growing, but that they were moving.
Speaker 1: This is another thing about it too, People say these
Speaker 1: rocks move. And again, this is in Romania, in the
Speaker 1: Carpathian region. People have lived there for a really long time.
Speaker 1: They've lived around these rocks for a really long time.
Speaker 1: They've been observing them for a really long time. So
Speaker 1: you can't exactly poop poo some of the things that
Speaker 1: they've observed about these very special rocks. Yeah, and apparently
Speaker 1: walking or moving is part of them. So this researcher
Speaker 1: went and said, I filmed this thing moving at tenth
Speaker 1: of an inch two and a half millimeters in two weeks,
Speaker 1: and and don't ask me for the film or any fallout.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's like, so what do you think of that?
Speaker 2: And everyone's like, oh boy, this guy doesn't know there's
Speaker 2: an open bar in the back right.
Speaker 1: So the thing is they're not discounting it fully that
Speaker 1: these things can move, but the rocks wouldn't be moving, say,
Speaker 1: like the heating and cooling of the soil could cause
Speaker 1: some sort of movement of the rocks moving them along.
Speaker 1: And there are rocks that that move. They don't move
Speaker 1: by their own locomotion. There's not a rock in the
Speaker 1: world that moves by itself, even if it's rolling down hills,
Speaker 1: it's under the force of gravity. But there are rocks
Speaker 1: in uh oh, Death Valley. I think the sailing stones.
Speaker 1: Have you seen them?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I feel like we talked about those in a video.
Speaker 2: It sounded familiar, or maybe I just had heard of them.
Speaker 1: But they they leave a track behind them. They are
Speaker 1: definitely moving, yeah, and they're too big for a human
Speaker 1: to push as like a prank or a joke. Like
Speaker 1: the crop circles. Were figured out that the very thin
Speaker 1: layers of ice form on the floor of Death Valley
Speaker 1: sometimes and as it melts, it breaks into little sheets
Speaker 1: that actually kind of move the rocks along for distances.
Speaker 2: Amazing. Another pretty cool thing that they found out in
Speaker 2: Oslo where else is they're like, hey, how do we
Speaker 2: explain the fact that we have found these fossils in here?
Speaker 2: Though these marine fossils, there's bivalves in here, there's gastropod
Speaker 2: fossils sometimes, And they said, well, the best we can
Speaker 2: come up with, and this makes total sense, is that
Speaker 2: the area where they're found used to be an ancient
Speaker 2: marine environment. Because they're finding those fossils in there and
Speaker 2: also that calcium carbonate and we've kind of been holding
Speaker 2: onto this till the end. That is the essential ingredient
Speaker 2: in marine shells. So it seems pretty clear it was
Speaker 2: probably a marine environment in ancient times.
Speaker 1: Boom, Pretty cool the fact of the podcast.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there most of them are found it just
Speaker 2: not even just Romania, but this one sand court, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've seen both. I've seen them that you can
Speaker 1: find them around the Carpathia region, but there's definitely a
Speaker 1: huge population of them in what's now the Trouvons Museum
Speaker 1: Natural Reserve in Valca County, Romania. And there's a village
Speaker 1: in particular, Otosani Village, which is very well known for it,
Speaker 1: so much so that I think that's where the idea
Speaker 1: that they can only be found there comes from. But
Speaker 1: there's still I mean, you're not going to find them
Speaker 1: in like Peru or Zimbabwe or something right there, just
Speaker 1: in this very limited area of the world in Romania.
Speaker 2: That's right, So shout out to the Otasani village and
Speaker 2: the other one is the Costesty Village.
Speaker 1: Very nice, Chuck, And I guess since I said very nice,
Speaker 1: I don't have anything else to you.
Speaker 2: No, we should just let people know they're protected, like
Speaker 2: so you can't go and break them and run off
Speaker 2: with them. UNESCO is protecting these things.
Speaker 1: Now, do not do that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, don't do that.
Speaker 1: Leave nature alone.
Speaker 2: Yeah that's right. But I have nothing else aside from that.
Speaker 1: Okay, short stuff is that?
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