What is a clay?

What is a clay?.. At first glance this is a very simple question. But, try to answer and see that everything is not so simple. It turns out that the history of clay origination is very complex and entertaining.

What is clay?.. At first glance this is a very simple question. But, try to answer and see that everything is not so simple

And everything begins at great depths, where the melted granite masses boil. Saturated with water vapor and gases, they bubble, punching their way to the surface. The viscous molten mass, like dough, pours into the earth's crust and slowly solidifies in the form of huge granite massifs and granite veins. In the colorful pattern of granites, pink or white crystals are observed, surrounded by black leaves mica and a gray translucent quartz material. These white, gray, yellowish or rosy minerals are feldspar, and it is the source of what the clay is made of in the future.

But on the surface of the earth, the waters begin to erode granites, the rivers crash deeper into their masses. But most of all, the feldspars change. Water and sun destroy them to the end, the carbonic acid of the air takes away certain chemicals, water - others. Feldspar crumbles into the smallest powder. Remains of former crystals of feldspar accumulate in the form of fine and dark silt. The hot climate of the deserts helps such destruction: the forces of the wind take the smallest particles, accumulating them, like snowdrifts, where their impulses do not reach. And in the same way, the glandular dark waters of the marshes help in the formation of mud, and in the marshy lowlands of a hot tropical forest, the clay accumulates on the bottom in the form of clay particles.

In addition, large ice masses, coming from the north, are rubbed into fine dust by collapsing stones; in the form of glacial dregs, this dust is carried far away by glacial waters, and the clay accumulated thus forms behind the glacier for many thousands of kilometers.

And what can you say about your cup and your plate of porcelain or faience? Her story is even more interesting, and pure clay - kaolin, from which the porcelain is made, has gone even more difficult way - from melted magma with their hot melts of depths through the hot breaths of water vapor and poisonous gases until peaceful sediment at the bottom of shallow lakes.

But, the history of clay does not end on a brick, pottery, porcelain plate or a simple pot? Clay and some substances close to it contain still completely different possibilities. Of these, a remarkably lightweight aluminum metal is melted, from which the skeletons of aircraft are built, make wires for power plants, pans, cups and spoons.

Meanwhile, in 1769, Academician Pallas talked about the inability to use clay and stone in the construction of cities - these "log foci of devastating fires".

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