Last week, I read about igneous rocks along with Vidush from his Class 5 Science text book. While I remember reading about different types of rocks - sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic, limited examples of these types is what I could recall.
The current textbook had new rocks as examples of igneous rocks for example that I learnt about.
One was Obsidian that I encountered couple of days before in Terry Pratchet's Eric.
The more interesting was Pumice which was stated as the only rock that floats on water ! The description and accompanying pictured showed that it has a lots of small holes that leads to this surprising property. Quite an interesting property for a rock - guess sinks like a stone does not apply to Pumices.
For some reason, my mind immediately linked Pumice to Ramayana. Specifically to the Ram setu - the stone bridge across the ocean to reach Lanka that was built by the Vanar sena.
As the story goes, the monkeys wrote Sri Ram on rocks and threw them on water and lo and behold they did not sink !
While this is often shown as yet another example of the greatness of Lord Rama, could it be possible that, if this epic actually played out as believed by millions of Hindus, then the rocks were actually Pumice ?
Thought this was an interesting question. Some geological and archaeological research would be required to see if there was any volcanic activity in the southern parts of India in that era that could have made this possible.
The current textbook had new rocks as examples of igneous rocks for example that I learnt about.
One was Obsidian that I encountered couple of days before in Terry Pratchet's Eric.
The more interesting was Pumice which was stated as the only rock that floats on water ! The description and accompanying pictured showed that it has a lots of small holes that leads to this surprising property. Quite an interesting property for a rock - guess sinks like a stone does not apply to Pumices.
For some reason, my mind immediately linked Pumice to Ramayana. Specifically to the Ram setu - the stone bridge across the ocean to reach Lanka that was built by the Vanar sena.
As the story goes, the monkeys wrote Sri Ram on rocks and threw them on water and lo and behold they did not sink !
While this is often shown as yet another example of the greatness of Lord Rama, could it be possible that, if this epic actually played out as believed by millions of Hindus, then the rocks were actually Pumice ?
Thought this was an interesting question. Some geological and archaeological research would be required to see if there was any volcanic activity in the southern parts of India in that era that could have made this possible.
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