Olympic Curling Stones Come From A Scottish Island Linked To Open Championship

Curling is the darling sport of the Winter Olympics.

Every four years followers turn into transfixed by athletes that appear to be us sliding and curling 40-pound rocks down a 50-yard ice track with often laser-like precision.

Those stones spend quite a lot of time banging into each other and but they rarely break. It seems that is due to where they come from, the tiny and distinctive Scottish Stone Island Outlet Online Shop (published here) of Ailsa Craig, higher referred to as the gorgeous backdrop island for the Ailsa Course at Turnberry, the Scottish golf course owned by President Donald Trump. Turnberry has hosted the Open Championship four instances, most lately in 2009.

Maddie Stone Island Italia Meyer/Getty Photographs
In line with the BBC, the granite used in all curling stones comes from one among two locations, the island Stone Island Outlet Shop of Ailsa Craig or a quarry in Wales. For the Olympics, all stones are made from the Ailsa Craig granite.

The start of the 220-acre island island was a bit of an ideal storm that led to one thing extraordinarily uncommon — granite easy sufficient to be predictable on ice and strong sufficient to withstand banging into different large and heavy stones.

Michael Easter of Scientific American described what makes the stone so particular:

The stones' efficiency traces back to the island's formation about 60 million years ago. Ailsa Craig is a volcanic intrusion—a mass of magma that pressured its means up between current formations—explains John Faithfull, a geologist at the University of Glasgow. The magma then cooled comparatively quickly to form granite, and the encircling rock eroded away, "leaving just the very resistant arduous mass of Ailsa Craig poking up out of the water," Faithfull says.

Because the volcanic rock crystallized, it developed a strong, uniform floor. "When magma cools rapidly, it creates very small crystals. These ones interlocked, and chemical bonds developed between them," says Martin Gillespie, a geologist on the British Geological Survey. "It also doesn't appear to have any microcracks," he says of the granite.

This led to the formation of three kinds of granite on the island, two of that are used to make curling stones. Blue hone granite makes up the layer of the stone that glides on ice and customary inexperienced granite is used for the middle layer that strikes other stones.