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Deterioration of building stones and stone buildings
Published in John A. Hudson†, John W. Cosgrove, Understanding Building Stones and Stone Buildings, 2019
John A. Hudson†, John W. Cosgrove
From the work of the TEAM project, the references cited, and the principles of structural geology and rock mechanics, the reader is invited to speculate with us on the likely reasons for the Carrara marble bowing. We know that the Carrara marble from Italy is the result of three Tertiary overprinted tectono-metamorphic deformations of a limestone. These resulted in the marble having an orthotropic structure, i.e., having different properties in the three main directions, both on the small and large scales, a feature exploited during quarrying. We also know that the in situ rock can contain high active stresses because rockbursts have occurred in some underground rooms at the Carrara marble quarry. We also suspect that there are small-scale residual stresses within the complex marble microstructure as a result of anisotropic expansion and contraction of single crystals, both before the marble was quarried and subsequently.
Metamorphic Rocks
Published in F.G.H. Blyth, M. H. de Freitas, A Geology for Engineers, 2017
F.G.H. Blyth, M. H. de Freitas
Many varieties of marble may arise, some beautifully coloured because of traces of substances in the original sediment. Decorative stones of this kind are exported from Italy and Greece. The rocks are cut into thin slabs, with one surface polished, and are used as panels for interior decoration; advantage may be taken of any pattern due to veining or zones of brecciation by arranging the slabs symmetrically in groups of two or four. The white Carrara Marble (N.W. Italy) is a metamorphosed Jurassic limestone.
Human-induced changes and phyto-geomorphological relationships in the historical ravaneti landscape of the Carrara marble basin (Tuscany, Italy)
Published in International Journal of Mining, Reclamation and Environment, 2023
Rodolfo Gentili, Linda Alderighi, Alessandro Errico, Maria Cristina Salvatore, Sandra Citterio, Federico Preti, Carlo Baroni
On the one hand, the Carrara marble basin has become a unique anthropogenic/geological landscape (Figure 2), which is also a tourist attraction. Beyond the quarry fronts and quarry yards, the landscape of the Carrara quarries is characterised by extensive and impressive dump deposits deriving from the excavation process and wasted along the mountain slopes. These deposits form anthropogenic geomorphologic complexes locally called ‘ravaneti’ [4,5], which cover about 60% of the surface of the quarrying areas [6]. According to the different techniques of marble extraction used over time, the ravaneti exhibit different shapes and structures resulting from weathering and textural characteristics. The oldest and deepest ravaneti deposits consist of flattened marble pebbles of the pre-Roman and Roman ages. The ravaneti of the 19th century are characterised by blocks with an average size of less than 30 cm (‘man-head’ shape). Finally, the most recent ravaneti mainly consist of pebbles and boulders with abundant fine matrix (from sand to silt), and they derive from the waste of new excavation methods employed over the ‘70s of the past century (i.e. chain cutters and diamond wire [4,7]). The advent of the diamond wire machines for marble block extraction has enormously increased the extraction rate and the amount of ravaneti deposits. At present, the area is intensively mined, with a production rate that can reach over 4 million tons of marble per year, 1 million in blocks and 3 millions in debris or sub products [8]. Although marble quarrying is of great economic importance in many world countries (e.g. at Carrara the total economic value, including the induced effects, was over 1 billion euros in 2017; see [8]), this massive extraction has produced environmental issues including landscape degradation, slope stability, and biodiversity loss. These problems have received international attention thanks to the mention of the Carrara quarries in the popular documentary film ‘Anthropocene-The Human Epoch’ [9].