How ancient microbes may have helped build Buckingham Palace
Scientists have found the building blocks used in the royal palace were made from microbes that lived 200 million years ago.
Buckingham Palace was (of course) built from the ground by humans but a new study suggests ancient microbes may have lent a helping hand. Well, sort of.
A research team from the Australian National University (ANU) says that the material used to build the royal palace and other famous buildings – such as the British Museum and St Paul’s Cathedral in London and the Pentagon in the US – were made by microbes that lived during the Jurassic period around 200 million years ago.
The buildings are constructed from a popular building material called oolitic limestone, so named because it is made of tiny spheres of carbonate called ooids.
According to ANU researcher Dr Bob Burne, this debunks the popular “snowball theory” that ooids were formed by grains rolling on the seafloor and accumulating layers of sediment.
Dr Burne said: “We have proposed a radically different explanation for the origin of ooids that explains their definitive features.
Humans have been known to use oolitic limestone since ancient times.
In fact, oolitic limestones from different geological periods have been found around the world, including in Germany, the US, the Bahamas, China and Australia.
“Jurassic oolite in England has been used to construct much of the City of Bath, the British Museum and St Paul’s Cathedral.
“Mississippian oolite found in Indiana in the US has been used to build parts of the Pentagon in Virginia and parts of the Empire State Building in New York City.”
“We considered the problem theoretically using an approach inspired by a mathematical model developed in 1972 for the growth of some brain tumours.”
The research is published in the journal Scientific Reports.
