History

The first question: can we talk about the history of the stone? The story usually tells about the life of living beings and about the changes that happened to them in a certain period of time. It is dynamics! And life is a continuous movement, development and change… But the stone – it would seem that there is no life. It is a dead part of Nature.

Stone is the symbol of immobility, of eternal rest. It is used for building monuments for the ages, build cities and engineering facilities — for centuries. So the stones are eternal and there wasn`t any changes with it, even in the long period of our lives, it is not happening. That`s mean about what “stone history” we can talk? Using two words “stone” and “history” are incompatible.

However, this conclusion is wrong. Mineralogists say that the rocks are “live” and have an interesting history. However, their “life” different from the life of living beings, so the story of the life they have another. Stone is “born”, “grows”, “live”, “changes”, is destroyed and disappears, as if “dying” to be reborn in a new stone. Of course, these terms with respect to conventional stone and have no biological significance. But the stone has its life and its history!

The life of a stone flows infinitely slowly and measures in thousands and sometimes even millions of years. It is very difficult to notice changes in the stone, that happened for many years. That’s why we believe that stone is a part of dead Nature, and it seems to us the eternal and unchanging!

If I could have a time machine or use time-lapse filming to show what happens to the stone for a very long time, it was possible to follow all the changes that accumulate in the stone under the influence of the external factors. In our eyes, the stone would’ve been raised, formed, disappeared and were reborn in each other and in life of a living being, all this would run its own, special laws of Nature.

In natural conditions the sun and rain, frost and wind, water and ice, the internal heat of the Earth, etc., are exposed the stones turning it into something new. Stones, or rather the minerals from which they consist are stable only at a certain temperature and pressure, a certain compound in the environment. Conditions are changing —minerals are dissolving, and chemical elements “migrate” in the new connection. And there is appeared new rock. So looks the life of a stone, written in this story!

World of stone is huge and very varied. Mineralogists found that the ways of existence of different rock masses innumerable. Everything that happens with natural stone, you can learn from the biography of the stone, which is closely connected with the geological history of the Earth. Geologists looked into the depths of time and were able to read the story of the stones, reveal the secrets of their formation. Rock is a physically challenging body, consisting of one or more minerals. But both are formed by natural processes in the earth’s crust.

Minerals appeared at a very early stage of development of the Earth as a planet. They are the first witnesses of the geological history of the Earth. This story is encoded in their properties and characteristics. As he wrote G. X. Andersen, a novel of the Earth all the more interesting novels we have to read in layers, silicon layers of various earth periods.

What is the beginning of the story of a stone? Academician A. E. Fersman said that the history of the stone begins with the most remote epochs of human existence.

Didn`t the stone exist on Earth before the advent of man,? Existed. And this is confirmed by the Geology. The stone is as old as our Earth. It is an integral part of the Earth and especially its upper part of the crust. The stone is inseparable from the Earth and participates in its geological history.

Rocks form the earth’s surface relief. Stone is a witness of the changes of the earth’s surface under the influence not only of external nature but also other, internal forces, hidden in the depths of the Earth and is manifested sometimes in the form of eruptions of volcanoes and devastating earthquakes.

Over millions and billions of years, the stone lay on the surface of the Earth is immobile and eternal, forming on the background of natural scenery, ancient past of the Earth as a kind of “permanent local subjects” pertinent to modern radar.

In those days, the stone didn`t have its own history or it was very monotonous. Only with the advent of a man who began to dig it out of the ground and use for their needs, began a new story of the stone. It was associated with its extraction, processing, using and in some cases even destruction. The stone passed the stages such as “birth, life and destruction”…

The all-new useful properties of the stone were revealed with the development of human society and the development of nature rock. Modern life is unthinkable without the stone.