"Nördlingen"
by Quora
"Nördlingen, in Bavaria, Germany, looks like a fairytale town, with its perfectly preserved medieval walls and its eye-catching circular shape. But what makes it truly unique isn't apparent at first glance: the entire town is literally built on a geological treasure, a legacy of a catastrophic event 15 million years ago. The stone blocks that make up the houses, towers, and churches contain approximately 72,000 tons of tiny diamonds, a detail no one had ever suspected until the 20th century.
For generations, the residents of Nördlingen believed that the large crater in which the town sits was the result of an ancient volcanic eruption. Only in the 1960s, when two American geologists, Eugene Shoemaker and Edward Chao, visited the area, did the truth finally come to light. As soon as they entered the church of San Giorgio and noticed the presence of microdiamonds in the walls, they realized that this place was not created by the fire of a volcano, but by the devastating impact of a kilometer-wide asteroid. The pressure and heat generated by the collision were so intense that they transformed the carbon present in the rock into a shower of microscopic diamonds, trapped forever in the suevite stone that today constitutes most of the city's buildings.
The 26-kilometer-wide Nördlinger Ries crater is one of the most spectacular examples of a meteorite impact on Earth, so realistic that it was chosen by the astronauts of the Apollo 14 and 16 missions as a training site for identifying lunar rocks. According to geologist Stefan Hölzl, no other place in the world has such a massive amount of impact material used to build an entire town. The Church of St. George alone is said to contain approximately 5,000 carats of diamonds, an impressive number that, however, has no economic value: the gems are too small to be mined or used in jewelry.
So, as visitors stroll through the medieval streets of Nördlingen, perhaps unaware of their surroundings, they are actually walking through a gigantic open-air geological museum, a place where human and cosmic history intertwine in surprising ways. The diamonds may not make the residents rich, but they do give the city an aura like no other: that of being built, literally, on the sparks of a collision from space."
No comments:
Post a Comment