Exceptionally well-preserved tufas located west of Calama, Atacama Desert, Chile, designated Santa Juana tufas, record episodic wetter conditions, relative to today, over the past 500,000 years. Globally, tufa architecture and depositional details are poorly understood as most described have been degraded by weathering erosion. In hyperarid Atacama, post-depositional alteration is negligible, t...

Since ages, architects and artists worldwide have focused on usage of durable stones as marble and limestone for construction of beautiful and magnificent historic monuments as European Cathedrals, Roman, and Greek temples, Taj Mahal etc. But survival of these irreplaceable cultural and historical assets is in question these days due to their degradation and deterioration caused by number of bi...

Analyses of samples of the raw materials locally available for use in the Eaton (Hopewell) Furnace indicate that the iron ore and bituminous coal were of good smelting quality while the limestone (flux) was not. The limestone had a much higher then desirable silica content and a low calcium content. The limestone was insufficient to the task of removing impurities introduced through the fuel co...

Wt% of aragonite, a CaCO(3) polymorph, increased with higher hydraulic activity ( degrees C) of limestone in precipitated calcium carbonate (PCC) from the lime-soda process (Ca(OH)(2)-NaOH-Na(2)CO(3)). Only calcite, the most stable polymorph, was crystallized at hydraulic activity under 10 degrees C, whereas aragonite also started to crystallize over 10 degrees C. The crystallization of PCC is ...

Sanliurfa limestone is becoming increasingly popular for both interior and exterior building applications in the local area in south east Turkey, being easy to cut and shape and suitable for many purposes. Although these limestones are low cost construction materials, they are not widely used elsewhere due to the lack of data regarding their chemical, physico-thermal and mechanical properties a...

Alkali activated material has recently attracted great attention as an environmentally friendly building material. Generally, it exhibits higher mechanical properties and better durability when compared with Portland cement based materials. In this article, mixed alkali activated systems consisting of N-A-S-H and C-A-S-H hydrated gels were produced, using metakaolin as a dominated starting mate...

Studies on actinobacterial diversity in limestone habitats are scarce. This paper reports profiling of actinobacteria isolated from Hundung limestone samples in Manipur, India using ARDRA as the molecular tool for preliminary classification. A total of 137 actinobacteria were clustered into 31 phylotypic groups based on the ARDRA pattern generated and representative of each group was subjected ...

An image processing workflow is presented for the characterization of pore and grain size distributions in porous geological samples from X-ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images. The five sandstone including Berea, Buff Nugget, Castlegate, Bentheimer, one carbonate sample, Indiana limestone, are extracted using proposed workflow. Two-dimensional acquired S...