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Gravatar Having just moved to one of the limestone capitals of the world, I find this all fascinating. I wonder what type of limestone they meant?


Gravatar MAYBE THEY MEANT LIMESTONE


Gravatar Beautiful blog, filled with inspiration


Gravatar Auntie Sarah: Shows how much I know... I thought limestone was just limestone! But of course there would be different sorts. And I wonder if limestone is related to quicklime somehow? Probably.

GWENT: Maybe.

cathy: Thank you! And thanks for stopping by.


Gravatar Yes, there are lots of types of limestone: think of all the different things that live or roll around in the sea! There's shelly limestone, there's coral limestone, there's oolitic limestone, there's algal limestone, there's muddy limestone, there's sandy limestone. The list goes on and on. Limestone is also quite chemically reactive compared to sandstone which is rather inert. It can therefore transform quite significantly as it is buried, changing, for example, into dolomite.

Quicklime is limestone that has been baked in a furnace at about 900 degrees C. It is caustic and one of its uses is to throw on dead bodies as they are buried and make them disappear more quickly.

I didn't know a limestone sarcophagous had the same effect. It would be interesting to know why.

Ivy, don't forget to send me some poems for Connaissances... Especially poems about limestone!


Gravatar There's a town near here named "Oolitic."

Really nice limestone has a look of food about it, like blocks of halva or cheese. It's very tempting. What's the greek name for a rock-eater?


Gravatar Jonathan: I should've known you'd be just the right person to ask! Yes, I am a-pondering it.

Auntie Sarah: Oolitic is a nice word to say. Lithophagy is the practice of ingesting stone to aid digestion. So... a lithophage?


Gravatar It'd be fun to put a lithophage and a sarcophagus in a room together and see who won.


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