Tectonic activity bends rocks all the time, even hard ones like granite. That takes a ton of heat, pressure and time. It also makes sense that in the right conditions, sheets of rock simply don’t have the room to shatter so they must bend.
Have we been able to do the same in a lab and would it have any commercial use? Bending a random bit of hard rock would be an interesting novelty, for sure.
Sort of. I work closely with geophysics in the rock mechanics world. I don’t personally know if any machines that create folds at large scale due to the heat and pressure required but rock deformation is a big thing they do. I’ve built a few machines that do this.
Small scale experiments at the temperatures and pressures required are done using diamond anvils at extreme pressure and sometimes with laser heating.
Larger scale is done with giant hydraulic presses called triaxes that use confining pressures up to the Gigapascal level.
Oh, rock on! (Lulz, I made a pun by mistake.)
Yeah, I never thought we could do it at a super large scale since the forces required are too massive. However, I find it funny that we actually do bend rocks, for whatever reason.
The elephant in the room is why? Based on what you described, it seems like a very specific problem that is expensive to solve and happens to be dynamic enough to merit repeated testing.
I am gonna make a wild guess for fun though…
I am guessing the reason it’s done has something to do with mining and trying to solve material density problems. If I needed to drill through a few layers of rock and I knew the material types, sticking samples of those materials in a press that simulates tectonic activity would give me a good idea what I was dealing with. That data seems like it would be key in setting feeds and speeds for expensive drills…
I am guessing the reason it’s done has something to do with mining and trying to solve material density problems.
This is definitely part of it. Oil companies have labs that run samples all day every day to study the density and porosity of rocks to see how much oil or gas they could hold when they’re trying to find new areas to drill.
Most of what I’m familiar with is research labs at universities where they are studying it to simulate tiny earthquakes. It’s just pure research to learn more about how the earth functions as a system. All rocks are different and all situations are different so the more data you collect the more you can understand exactly what happened during an earthquake and why. Maybe it can lead to better earthquake prediction or it can let us use those earthquakes to know more about the structure of the earth.
Really depends on how strict you are in those definitions. Details asside, if you twist a metal fork this is technically bending a rock
Yes… can even make a slinky…
That is actually more of an illusion that is exploiting any bit of natural flexibility over a given length.
If you took a circle of rock that is 30cm in diameter, cut it into a spiral at a width of 5mm, you get a length of rock that is now about 14m, but in a coil.
So, if the material had a flex of 1mm per half meter, you would see a total deviation of about 28mm from end to end. The “illusion” part is that while it’s only flexing a small amount, you can see the entire range of flex at once.
It’s still a spring, but it hasn’t actually been significantly bent or reformed. Also, it’s still really cool.
Creep is the mechanism you refer to. Yes absolutely scientists can replicate creep in the lab. You too can at home by leaving butter on the counter and watching it bend under its own weight at room temperature after a few days.
At about 1/2 or 2/3 of the melting temp and above, materials start to behave kind of funny.
