(ORDO NEWS) — The tiny Romanian town of Costesti is home to many strange rocks. These bulging boulders slowly exude their insides and may even appear to grow and move as if they were alive.
The trovants have not been studied much by scientists , but the strange stones have attracted the attention of many geologists and tourists over the years.
They can be found in numerous strange places scattered north of the Romanian capital Bucharest.
There is some debate about this, but trovants are thought to be sandstone concretions with hard outer layers of sand.
These concretions are harder than the rocks around them, so when the surrounding softer rock is eroded, they can emerge from the Earth.
When rain falls on a rock, the rainwater reacts with the mineral content of the nodules, causing its interior to dry out, causing the rock to expand.
Alternatively, it can lead to the formation of large blistering growths that look like the stone is procreating.
Of course, we’re talking about geology here, so it’s going very, very slowly.
According to experts, the stones “grow” by less than 5 centimeters in 1200 years. Don’t expect to catch this phenomenon on slow motion video.
“Trovants are mostly ovoid or spherical in shape, although they can have a wide variety of shapes,” Florin Stoikan, from the Buila Vanturarita National Park, told Radio Romania International in 2010.
“Their story is pretty simple. Seven million years ago there was a delta where a modern quarry is located.
This delta contained sediments, in particular sandstone and siltstone, which were collected and transported from all over the continent by the prehistoric river.
Subsequently, various minerals dissolved in the solutions that circulated through this pool of gravel and sand,” he added.
“These minerals acted like cement and stuck together various sedimentary particles.
Today there are trovants with a diverse composition. Some are made of sandstone, others of gravel.
In geological terminology, they are composed of sandstone and conglomerates,” continued Stoykan.
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