April 30, 2025 • 11 mins
Rocks that grow baby rocks – wut?!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
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 trovants or trovins or droving.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
I bet it's travant. I don't know why I didn't
look it up, but I'm gonna go with that.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
In fact, they look like they're growing smaller rocks out
of the bigger rocks. Not supposed to happen to anybody
outside of the field of geology, but they are. And
so some people are like, these rocks are living, they
move around, they're gonna they're gonna kill you and your
entire family if if given the chance.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Yeah, they have babies.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Yeah, Yeah, it's amazing. Did you look up some of
the pictures of them.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Yeah, they're awesome. They're pretty smooth looking, they're lumpy. 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 way
a few grams, or they can be very very large,
like boulder esque, like fifteen feet high, several tons in weight.
(01:26):
And people since the eighteenth century have been like, what
are these things? They look like dinosaur eggs or alien pods?
What's happening here?
Speaker 1 (01:34):
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 it. They're rocks.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
That's right. When they started getting serious and we're like, guys,
can we move past alien pods and dinosaur eggs and
really try and figure this out.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
I took it to be alien pods, is what people
are saying on the internet now.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
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
(02:19):
along a river, just building up and sort of cementing,
almost like a snowball rolling downhill. That is a concretion, yes.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
And in Oslo in two thousand and eight, the International
Geological Conference congress.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Man to that place.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
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
(02:59):
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,
(03:22):
so it's made up of a bunch of different stuff.
Turns out trovants 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 going to take a stab at explaining them.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Yeah, And they closed that session of the International Geological
Congress and Oslo by chanting open bar, open bar, and.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
They all got busy.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
So they in Oslo they hypothesize 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
(04:13):
this case the sandstone is calcium carbonate.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
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 Miocene sub epoch, which as
(04:37):
everyone knows, is about five point three million years ago,
and they smushed the sandstone together. And if you look
at a lot of the trovons, 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 shape rocks growing out of the
(05:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Let's do it. So another little oddity here we have
(05:42):
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 that calcium carbonate and the
other stuff, and there's a pressurized reaction that makes the
(06:05):
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.
It'll be like a little pocket where this stuff, you know,
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.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
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
(06:48):
lifespan is fairly short compared to how long it would
take to watch a trovont grow.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Right, Yeah, I think the deposition rate is about an
inch and a half maybe a couple inches every year. No,
every hundred years, no, every five hundred years, no, every
thousand years. Yes, yeah, so an inch and a half
to two inches every one thousand years. That has not
(07:14):
stopped certain patient people from sitting there and looking at
them from a long time.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Though, right, Yeah, for sure. There was one researcher who
said that they filmed travants 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.
(07:39):
They've been observing them for a really long time. So
you can't exactly poop poo some of the things that
they've observed about these very special rocks. Yeah, and apparently
walking or moving is part of them. So this researcher
went and said, I filmed this thing moving at tenth
of an inch two and a half millimeters in two weeks,
(07:59):
and and don't ask me for the film or any fallout.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
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 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 down hills,
(08:34):
it's under the force of gravity. But there are rocks
in uh oh, Death Valley. I think the sailing stones.
Have you seen them?
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Yeah? I feel like we talked about those in a video.
It sounded familiar, or maybe I just had heard of them.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
But they they leave a track behind them. They are
definitely moving, yeah, and they're too big for a human
to push as like a prank or a joke. Like
the crop circles. Were 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
(09:09):
that actually kind of move the rocks along for distances.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Amazing. Another pretty cool thing that they found out in
Oslo where else is they're 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
(09:34):
marine environment. Because they're finding those fossils in there and
also that calcium carbonate and we've kind of been 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.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Boom, Pretty cool the fact of the podcast.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Yeah, and there most of them are found it just
not even just Romania, but this one sand court, right.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Yeah, I've seen both. I've seen them that you can
find them around the Carpathia region, but there's definitely a
huge population of them in what's now the Trouvons Museum
Natural Reserve in Valca County, Romania. And there's a village
in particular, Otosani Village, which is very well known for it,
so much so that I think that's where the idea
(10:23):
that they can only be found there comes from. But
there's still I mean, you're not going to find them
in like Peru or Zimbabwe or something right there, just
in this very limited area of the world in Romania.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
That's right, So shout out to the Otasani village and
the other one is the Costesty Village.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Very nice, Chuck, And I guess since I said very nice,
I don't have anything else to you.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Now, do not do that.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Yeah, don't do that.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Leave nature alone.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Yeah that's right. But I have nothing else aside from that.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Okay, short stuff is that?
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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 trovants or trovins or droving.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
I bet it's travant. I don't know why I didn't
look it up, but I'm gonna go with that.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
In fact, they look like they're growing smaller rocks out
of the bigger rocks. Not supposed to happen to anybody
outside of the field of geology, but they are. And
so some people are like, these rocks are living, they
move around, they're gonna they're gonna kill you and your
entire family if if given the chance.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Yeah, they have babies.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Yeah, Yeah, it's amazing. Did you look up some of
the pictures of them.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Yeah, they're awesome. They're pretty smooth looking, they're lumpy. 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 way
a few grams, or they can be very very large,
like boulder esque, like fifteen feet high, several tons in weight.
(01:26):
And people since the eighteenth century have been like, what
are these things? They look like dinosaur eggs or alien pods?
What's happening here?
Speaker 1 (01:34):
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 it. They're rocks.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
That's right. When they started getting serious and we're like, guys,
can we move past alien pods and dinosaur eggs and
really try and figure this out.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
I took it to be alien pods, is what people
are saying on the internet now.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
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
(02:19):
along a river, just building up and sort of cementing,
almost like a snowball rolling downhill. That is a concretion, yes.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
And in Oslo in two thousand and eight, the International
Geological Conference congress.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Man to that place.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
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
(02:59):
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,
(03:22):
so it's made up of a bunch of different stuff.
Turns out trovants 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 going to take a stab at explaining them.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Yeah, And they closed that session of the International Geological
Congress and Oslo by chanting open bar, open bar, and.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
They all got busy.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
So they in Oslo they hypothesize 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
(04:13):
this case the sandstone is calcium carbonate.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
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 Miocene sub epoch, which as
(04:37):
everyone knows, is about five point three million years ago,
and they smushed the sandstone together. And if you look
at a lot of the trovons, 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 shape rocks growing out of the
(05:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Let's do it. So another little oddity here we have
(05:42):
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 that calcium carbonate and the
other stuff, and there's a pressurized reaction that makes the
(06:05):
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.
It'll be like a little pocket where this stuff, you know,
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.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
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
(06:48):
lifespan is fairly short compared to how long it would
take to watch a trovont grow.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Right, Yeah, I think the deposition rate is about an
inch and a half maybe a couple inches every year. No,
every hundred years, no, every five hundred years, no, every
thousand years. Yes, yeah, so an inch and a half
to two inches every one thousand years. That has not
(07:14):
stopped certain patient people from sitting there and looking at
them from a long time.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Though, right, Yeah, for sure. There was one researcher who
said that they filmed travants 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.
(07:39):
They've been observing them for a really long time. So
you can't exactly poop poo some of the things that
they've observed about these very special rocks. Yeah, and apparently
walking or moving is part of them. So this researcher
went and said, I filmed this thing moving at tenth
of an inch two and a half millimeters in two weeks,
(07:59):
and and don't ask me for the film or any fallout.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
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 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 down hills,
(08:34):
it's under the force of gravity. But there are rocks
in uh oh, Death Valley. I think the sailing stones.
Have you seen them?
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Yeah? I feel like we talked about those in a video.
It sounded familiar, or maybe I just had heard of them.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
But they they leave a track behind them. They are
definitely moving, yeah, and they're too big for a human
to push as like a prank or a joke. Like
the crop circles. Were 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
(09:09):
that actually kind of move the rocks along for distances.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Amazing. Another pretty cool thing that they found out in
Oslo where else is they're 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
(09:34):
marine environment. Because they're finding those fossils in there and
also that calcium carbonate and we've kind of been 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.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Boom, Pretty cool the fact of the podcast.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Yeah, and there most of them are found it just
not even just Romania, but this one sand court, right.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Yeah, I've seen both. I've seen them that you can
find them around the Carpathia region, but there's definitely a
huge population of them in what's now the Trouvons Museum
Natural Reserve in Valca County, Romania. And there's a village
in particular, Otosani Village, which is very well known for it,
so much so that I think that's where the idea
(10:23):
that they can only be found there comes from. But
there's still I mean, you're not going to find them
in like Peru or Zimbabwe or something right there, just
in this very limited area of the world in Romania.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
That's right, So shout out to the Otasani village and
the other one is the Costesty Village.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Very nice, Chuck, And I guess since I said very nice,
I don't have anything else to you.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Now, do not do that.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Yeah, don't do that.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Leave nature alone.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Yeah that's right. But I have nothing else aside from that.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Okay, short stuff is that?
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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