They found pieces of rock 1.6 billion years ago in a missing part of Stonehenge

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5 before 2021 00:45 GMT

Geochemical analysis revealed grains of quartz in the piece that formed a “mosaic of interlocking crystals,” making the rock more resistant to the passage of time.

piece of stone Stonehenge, which was found and took with him a man who was doing restoration work on that structure located in the British county of Wiltshire, it was returned nearly three years ago and thanks to this scientists were able to uncover new details about its formation.

Robert Phillips, a worker at the company that helped restore Stonehenge in 1958, customized a cylindrical core that was removed by drilling one of the stacked stones, called Stone 58. Later, the man took the specimen with him to the United States and Only in 2018 did he bring it back to the United Kingdom, which makes it possible to carry out geochemical analyzes. Given the prestige that the famous monument currently protects, samples can no longer be extracted, to me Live Science.

the new Investigation, published this week in the journal Plos One, found that blocks of sandstone, called “sarsens,” contain sediments that formed When dinosaurs were still walking on Earth, more than 200 million years ago, and there are other rocky grains dating back 1.6 billion years.

“We did a cross-sectional survey of the rock, we gave it x-rays, we examined it with different microscopes, we examined its sedimentation and its chemistry,” said lead study author David Nash of the University of Brighton in England.

When scientists analyzed the piece, they were surprised to find it The stone was 99.7% quartz. The quartz grains formed a “mosaic of interlocking crystals,” making the rocks stronger, and perhaps the reason why builders chose this type of rock to erect the pillars of Stonehenge about 2,500 years ago.

“This material is incredibly strong. I wonder if the Stonehenge builders could know anything about the properties of this stone, and they chose not only the largest and closest blocks, but also the ones that had It is likely to stand the test of timeNash commented.

While new discoveries have provided valuable information about the monument, scholars still have many questions to answer. In 2019, workers at the Salisbury Museum in England discovered another missing fragment from Stonehenge, and a third piece remains whose whereabouts remain unknown.

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