Marble

Start the Clock

The Question

This document asks one narrow question: when scientists reproduce the structural processes associated with marble under controlled laboratory conditions, how long do those processes take?

Marble is a metamorphic carbonate rock, commonly produced by recrystallization of limestone or dolostone. For this investigation, that definition is enough. The issue here is time.

Start the Clock

Experimental studies using calcite-rich marble and carbonate material allow the clock to be started at a known moment. Pressure, temperature and stress are imposed; the experiment is allowed to run for a measured duration; then the specimen is recovered and examined.

The reported experimental clocks are not millions of years.

They are minutes, hours, days and weeks.

Fifteen Minutes to Sixteen Days

Controlled high-pressure and high-temperature carbonate experiments have been run for durations beginning at approximately fifteen minutes and extending through about sixteen days.

Within these experimental windows researchers can observe and measure structural responses of calcite, including deformation and recrystallization-related changes.

The importance to this investigation is the clock: measurable carbonate restructuring does not require geological durations when the required conditions are supplied directly.

Eighteen Hours to About Twenty-Two Days

Experiments on calcite marble under approximately 1.7 to 2.0 gigapascals and 500 to 600 degrees Celsius have also reproduced transformation of calcite toward the high-pressure calcium-carbonate polymorph aragonite.

Reported experimental durations extend from approximately eighteen hours to more than five hundred hours, roughly three-quarters of a day to about twenty-two days.

Again, the process is observed while the laboratory clock is running.

What Has Been Demonstrated

The laboratory has therefore demonstrated that important structural processes relevant to carbonate metamorphism can occur on directly measured timescales of minutes, hours, days and weeks.

That is the point of Domain 10A.

The laboratory does not require millions or billions of years for these reproduced mineral and microstructural processes to occur once the necessary physical conditions are present.

What Has Not Been Demonstrated

This does not establish that an entire natural marble deposit, mountain belt or kilometer-scale metamorphic body formed in fifteen minutes, eighteen hours, sixteen days or twenty-two days.

The size of a natural body introduces additional questions of heating, pressure establishment, fluid movement, deformation, cooling and scale.

Those are separate clocks and must be demonstrated separately.

A long age assigned to a natural marble body cannot, by itself, be substituted for a measured duration of the individual process that made its mineral architecture.

Domain 10A Finding

Marble gives us a laboratory clock.

Carbonate deformation and recrystallization-related processes have been experimentally observed over runs measured from minutes through days. High-pressure calcite transformation has been reproduced over approximately eighteen to more than five hundred hours.

The experimentally demonstrated processes therefore operate without requiring millions or billions of years.

If substantially longer durations are required to explain a complete natural marble body, the scientific question becomes specific:
Which additional process requires the additional time, and what measurement establishes that duration?

That is the question carried forward by Pressure Is of the Essence.

Research Record

Domain 10A draws upon published experimental studies of calcite-rich Carrara marble and carbonate materials under controlled pressure-temperature conditions, including experiments lasting approximately fifteen minutes to sixteen days and high-pressure calcite-to-aragonite experiments lasting approximately eighteen to more than five hundred hours.

These durations are reported only for the processes actually reproduced in the experiments. They are not automatically assigned to the construction of large natural marble bodies.

Produced by The Lilborn Equation Team:

Michael Lilborn-Williams

Thomas Jackson Barnard

Audrey Williams