We’re planning to launch a collection of ‘images that look like plants but aren’t’, and this beautiful dendritic stone will certainly be amongst them. It arrived last week with several others from a German website – http://www.topgeo.de/ – and originates, like so many on the market, from the famous Solnhofen limestone, a fossil-rich Jurassic formation that lies between Nuremberg and Munich in Bavaria.
The plant-like branching patterns form through a process known as ‘Diffusion Limited Aggregation’: molecules of water-borne manganese move about randomly, and when they bump into each other, stick together. Repeated billions of times, various types of dendritic (‘leaf-like’, from the Greek) patterns emerge. These are amongst the most universal patterns in nature, at every scale from blood vessels to continental river drainage systems. There’s a book about them due out in September by the excellent science-writer, Philip Ball, the last of a trilogy based on his earlier book ‘The Self-made Tapestry’ – I’ve got that and the two that have already been published, ‘Shapes’ and ‘Flows’, and 'Branches' is a snip as a pre-publication buy on Amazon!
The plant-like branching patterns form through a process known as ‘Diffusion Limited Aggregation’: molecules of water-borne manganese move about randomly, and when they bump into each other, stick together. Repeated billions of times, various types of dendritic (‘leaf-like’, from the Greek) patterns emerge. These are amongst the most universal patterns in nature, at every scale from blood vessels to continental river drainage systems. There’s a book about them due out in September by the excellent science-writer, Philip Ball, the last of a trilogy based on his earlier book ‘The Self-made Tapestry’ – I’ve got that and the two that have already been published, ‘Shapes’ and ‘Flows’, and 'Branches' is a snip as a pre-publication buy on Amazon!
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