Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Trovants

Episode Date: April 30, 2025

Rocks that grow baby rocks – wut?!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart podcast. We love learning about this extraordinary universe. And we love sharing what we've learned. And on our podcast, Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe. That's what we're going to do. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I think our universe is absolutely extraordinary. I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I study parasites. And there's just endless things about this universe that I find fascinating.

Basically, we're both nerds. Each Tuesday and Thursday, we take an hour long dive into some science topic. Hey and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here sitting in for Dave and this is short stuff about Trovance or Trovance or Trovance. I bet it's Trovant. I don't know why I didn't look it up but I'm gonna go with that. It's gotta be.

It doesn't matter, no one knows how to pronounce it. No one outside of Romania. And the reason I just mentioned Romania is because in the Carpathian area of Romania, there's a specific kind of rock that has captured the imagination of any human who's seen it because they are very weird looking. In fact, they look like they're growing smaller rocks out of the bigger rocks,

not supposed to happen to anybody outside the field of geology, but they are. And so some people are like, these rocks are living, they move around, they're gonna kill you and your entire family if given the chance. Yeah, they have babies. Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. Do you look up some of the pictures of them?

Yeah, they're awesome. They're pretty smooth looking. They're lumpy. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it looks, you know, look up a picture of these things. You know, not if you're driving, obviously, but so you can get it in your mind's eye. They can be little. They can be smaller than an inch and just weigh a few grams. Or they can be very, very large, like boulder-esque, like 15 feet high, several tons in weight. And people since the 18th century have been like,

what are these things? They look like dinosaur eggs or alien pods. What's happening here? Yeah, and they were wrong on both accounts. They really are rocks. They do grow. They do kind of calve off baby rocks, but they're not alive in any sense that we understand

that they're rocks. That's right. When they started getting serious and were like, guys, can we move past alien pods and dinosaur eggs and really try and figure this out? I took it to be alien pods is what people are saying on the internet now. Well, probably so, because that's where all that stuff takes place. But when they finally got serious, they were like, you know what's going on here? This is a concretion.

And a concretion is something that starts out as a little pebble or something or a leaf maybe, and then starts getting depositions, maybe sandstone, other kinds of grit and minerals washed along a river, just building up and sort of cementing, almost like a snowball rolling downhill, that is a concretion. Yes. And in Oslo in 2008, the International Geological Conference, Congress,

Man, the party's at that place. Yeah, that's the rocks that they were doing, I'm sure. Yeah. And they said, no, we don't think it's a concretion at all. I don't know who they were scolding, because I'm sure all the members were the ones who came up with the idea that it was a concretion. But they said, no, this is different than that.

A concretion is a rock where you have a nucleus. And then over time, sediments are deposited over it, and it grows and grows and grows. It's understandable why people said that Trovants were concretions for a very long time. But then somebody thought to cut one open, and when they did, they said there's no nucleus here. And with a typical concretion rock,

the sediments are whatever got attracted to it. So it's made up of a bunch of different stuff. Turns out, trevants are made entirely of sandstone, and in particular, they're made of calcium carbonate sandstone. So they're like, these are not concretions. What are they? We're not entirely certain,

but we're gonna take a stab at explaining them. Yeah, and they closed that session of the International Geological Congress in Oslo by chanting, open bar, open bar. And they all got busy. So they, in Oslo, they hypothesized that the minerals were carried by a prehistoric river along these little sandy sediments and formed a kind of a slurry solution, like you said, of mainly calcium carbonate.

Along with calcium carbonate, you can also get sandstone from iron oxide and quartz, but in this case the sandstone is calcium carbonate. Yeah, precisely. And so they figured out, okay, some sort of compression took place, the force of gravity kind of pushed these things together. And then apparently they were like even more pushed together by earthquakes that took place back in, I think the middle Myocene sub epoch, which as everyone knows is about 5.3 million years ago. And they smushed the sandstone together. And if you look at a lot of the Trovantsants especially the parts that are coming out of the ground, yeah it just

looks like a smushed normal rock right like pretty large but it doesn't it doesn't look weird. What makes it look weird is the spherical shaped rocks growing out of the other rocks and that actually has to do with the way that these rocks actually grow. And I say, Chuck, we take a break and we come back and talk about how they grow after this. Let's do it. Hey everyone, we want to tell you about our podcast. Hi, I'm Daniel.

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So another little oddity here we have to talk about is the fact that these things secrete cement. And this is sort of what lends people to think like, these things are alive. It's after a big rain. They will absorb the minerals from that rain. And then those minerals come in contact with the chemicals that are already in that stone, that calcium carbonate and the other stuff. And there's a pressurized reaction that makes the rock grow.

It grows in girth. And that sandstone is very porous. And so it's those places in between. It's not happening like the whole thing's not growing at once. There'll be like a little pocket where this stuff gets lodged and expands. And then it literally grows off little pieces and they can fall off and that's when people are like, look, it had a little rock baby. It had a baby.

Yeah. So, I mean, that's it. That's how they grow rocks, a chemical reaction that creates pressure in the rock that's so strong and they're so porous that it can actually bubble up and then over time as it grows and grows and grows, it can take on a spherical shape, right? So that's pretty amazing. What would be more amazing is if you could see this happen in real time, but you can't because the human lifespan

is fairly short compared to how long it would take to watch a Trovant grow, right? Yeah, I think the deposition rate is about an inch and a half, maybe a couple of inches every year? No, every hundred years? No of inches every year? No. Every hundred years? No. Every 500 years?

No. Every thousand years. Yes. Yeah, so an inch and a half to two inches every 1,000 years, that has not stopped certain patient people from sitting there and looking at them from a long time though, right?

Yeah, for sure. There was one researcher who said that they filmed Trevants for two weeks and said that not that they were growing, but that they were moving. This is another thing about it too. People say these rocks move. And again, this is in Romania, in the Carpathian region. People have lived there for a really long time. They've lived around these rocks for a really long time.

They've been observing them for a really long time. So you can't exactly poo-poo some of the things that they've observed about these very special rocks. And apparently walking or moving is part of them. So this researcher went and said, I filmed this thing moving a tenth of an inch, two and a half millimeters in two weeks, and don't ask me for the film or any follow-up question.

Yeah, he's like, so what do you think of that? And everyone's like, oh boy, this guy doesn't know there's an open bar in the back. Right, so the thing is they're not discounting it fully that these things can move, but the rocks wouldn't be moving, say like the heating and cooling of the soil could cause some sort of movement of the rocks,

moving them along. And there are rocks that move. They don't move by their own locomotion. There's not a rock in the world that moves by itself. Even if it's rolling downhill, it's under the force of gravity. But there are rocks in, oh, Death Valley, I think, the Sailing Stones.

Have you seen them? Yeah, I feel like we talked about those in a video. It sounded familiar, or maybe I just had heard of them. But they leave a track behind them. They are definitely moving. And they're too big for a human to push as like a prank or a joke like the crop circles were. And they figured out that the very thin layers of ice

form on the floor of Death Valley sometimes, and as it melts, it breaks into little sheets that actually kind of move the rocks along for distances. Amazing. Another pretty cool thing that they found out at Oslo, where else, is they were like, hey, how do we explain the fact that we have found these fossils in here, though, these marine fossils? There's bivalves in here, there's gastropod fossils sometimes, and they said, well, the best we can come up with, and this makes total sense, is that the area where they're found used to be an ancient marine environment because they're finding those fossils in there. And also, that calcium carbonate,

and we kind of been holding holding onto this till the end, that is the essential ingredient in marine shells. So it seems pretty clear it was probably a marine environment in ancient times. Boom. Pretty good. That was the fact of the podcast. Yeah, and most of them are found at just,

not even just Romania, but this one sand quarry, right? Yeah, I've seen both. I've seen them that you can find them at the, you can find them around the Carpathia region, but there's definitely a huge population of them in what's now the Trovants Museum Natural Reserve in Valsea County, Romania. And there's a village in particular,

Otisani Village, which is very well known for it, so much so that I think that's where the idea that they can only be found there comes from. But they're still, I mean, you're not going to find them in like Peru or Zimbabwe or something like that. They're just in this very limited area of the world in Romania. That's right. So shout out to the Otasani village and the other one is the Costesti village. Very nice, Chuck. And I guess since I said very nice, I don't have anything else to you?

No, we should just let people know they're protected. Like, so you can't go and break them and run off with them. UNESCO is protecting these things now. Do not do that. Yeah, don't do that. Leave nature alone. Yeah, that's right. But I have nothing else aside from that.

Okay, short stuff is out.