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

Curling is the darling sport of the Winter Olympics.

Each 4 years followers grow to be transfixed by athletes that look like us sliding and curling 40-pound rocks down a 50-yard ice monitor with often laser-like precision.

Those stones spend plenty of time banging into one another and yet they rarely break. It seems that is due to the place they come from, the tiny and distinctive Scottish island of Ailsa Craig, better often known as the attractive backdrop island for the Ailsa Course at Turnberry, the Scottish golf course owned by President Donald Trump. Turnberry has hosted the Open Championship 4 occasions, most not too long Cheap Stone Island Jackets Sale ago in 2009.

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In accordance with the BBC, the granite utilized in all curling stones comes from one in all two locations, the island of Ailsa Craig or a quarry in Wales. For the Olympics, all stones are made from the Ailsa Craig granite.

The delivery of the 220-acre island Stone Island Outlet was a bit of a perfect storm that led to something extremely uncommon — granite clean sufficient to be predictable on ice and strong sufficient to withstand banging into other large and heavy stones.

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

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

Because the volcanic rock crystallized, it developed a strong, uniform surface. "When magma cools shortly, it creates very small crystals. These ones interlocked, and chemical bonds developed between them," says Martin Gillespie, a geologist at the British Geological Survey. "It additionally would not seem to have any microcracks," he says of the granite.

This led to the formation of three forms 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 common green granite is used for the middle layer that strikes other stones.