What is Limestone?
Limestone is a sandy sedimentary rock formed closer to the earth’s surface and often captures fossilized plant and animal life. The composite of limestone is Calcium Carbonate (Calcite) or the double carbonate of Calcium and Magnesium (Dolomite). It also contains a variety of accessory minerals, silica, pyrite, iron oxides, clay minerals and bituminous matter from organic materials (plant & animals).
Limestone is a kind of sedimentary stone that is very common all over the Mediterranean and Europe. Limestone is made out of the shells of zillions of little tiny sea snails and creatures like that. These snails and stuff lived in the sea, billions of years ago, and when they died they fell to the bottom of the sea and rotted, but their shells, which were made of calcium like your teeth, did not rot and just stayed there. Pressure from other shells, and from the water, and from sand being washed over the shells, squashed them all together into rock. Many many years later, the sea changed where it was, and all this calcium-rock (limestone) was left on the land where people could quarry it (dig it up). When limestone gets even more squashed, it can turn into travertine or marble. Limestone is also the main way you get lime, which is one of the things you make cement out of. To get lime, you have to burn limestone in lime kilns, and then what is left is lime.
” What type of rock is limestone? Review the three different rock types. (Igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary.) How are sedimentary rocks formed? (Deposited in a body of water.) • Ask the students if they have ever collected sea shells on a beach. Where do the shells come from? (Animals in the water.) What are these shells made of? (Calcium carbonate.) Discuss the seas that once covered many parts of the United States. Shelled animals also lived in these ancient seas. Show the students several examples of shells, and pass them around. • Have the students ever found broken sea shells? What might cause them to break? Discuss the force of waves in the ocean. Show the students several examples of broken shells. Some are crushed into a fine powder! What will happen to the shells or shell pieces over time? Where will they go? (They settle to the ocean floor.) • Over a long period of time (thousands or millions of years) the shells and shell pieces at the bottom of the ocean will pile up in
Limestone is sedimentary rock consisting mostly of organic material such as skeletons and shells of marine creatures and sediments. It is formed by material which settles to the bottom of bodies of water, and over millions of years, solidifies into solid rock. Earth movements over extremely long periods of earth’s history can lift limestone miles into the air. The summit of Mount Everest is limestone that started out on an ocean floor.
