Buckingham Palace built with Jurassic period microbes

The building blocks of Buckingham Palace in London and many other iconic buildings were made by microbes that lived up to 200 million years ago during the Jurassic period, a new study led by the Australian National University has found.

The material, known as oolitic limestone, is a popular building material around the world and is almost completely made of millimetre-sized spheres of carbonate called ooids.

The study found that ooids were made of concentric layers of mineralised microbes, debunking the popular ‘snowball theory’ that ooids were formed by grains rolling on the sea floor and accumulating layers of sediment, said co-researcher Dr Bob Burne from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences.

“We have proposed a radically different explanation for the origin of ooids that explains their definitive features,” said Dr Burne.

The research has highlighted yet another vital role that microbes play on Earth and in our lives, he said.

Different types of oolitic limestones have formed in all geological periods and have been found around the world, including in the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, the Bahamas, China and at Shark Bay in Western Australia.

Dr Burne said humans had known about and used oolitic limestone since ancient times.

“Many oolitic limestones form excellent building stones, because they are strong and lightweight,” he said.

“Jurassic oolite in England has been used to construct much of the City of Bath, the British Museum and St Paul’s Cathedral. “Mississippian oolite found in Indiana in the US has been used to build parts of the Pentagon in Virginia and parts of the Empire State Building in New York City.”

Professor Murray Batchelor from ANU led an international team of researchers on the study, which is published in Scientific Reports.

“Our mathematical model explains the concentric accumulation of layers and predicts a limiting size of ooids,” said Professor Batchelor from the Research School of Physics and Engineering and the Mathematical Sciences Institute at ANU.

“We considered the problem theoretically using an approach inspired by a mathematical model developed in 1972 for the growth of some brain tumours.”

Professor Batchelor said the research findings could help better understand the effects of past climate change.

Other researchers involved in the study were Professor Bruce Henry from the University of New South Wales, Dr Fei Li from Southwest Petroleum University in China and Professor Josef Paul from Geowissenschaftliches Zentrum der Universität in Germany.

Image caption: Rogenstein oolite. Image courtesy of ANU.