The Queen Victoria Memorial
The Queen Victoria Memorial is located in front of Buckingham Palace and comprises of the Dominion Gates (Canada Gate, Australia Gate and South and West Africa Gates), the Memorial Gardens and a vast central monument commemorating the death of Queen Victoria in 1901.
The monument is 25 metres high and uses 2,300 tonnes of white Carrara marble and Pentelic marble. As well as Victoria, there are statues representing courage, constancy, victory, charity, truth and motherhood. The central monument, created between 1906 and 1924, is by Sir Thomas Brock, but the whole design, including the Memorial Gardens, was conceived by Sir Aston Webb.
The Memorial was formally unveiled by King George V in 1911.
The gates, piers, balustrades and retaining walls of the Memorial Gardens are all protected landmarks.
Marble
Marble is considered a metamorphic rock of carbonatic composition: this means that an already existing rock, of a carbonatic nature, undergoes transformations that make it marble.
The rock of origin of the marble is usually sedimentary, and mostly of calcareous composition: the deposition of these sediments takes place in the marine environment, at not excessive depht, because otherwise the calcium carbonate would melt and would not deposit to form limestones.
These are sediments often rich in fossils, whose shapes are then recognizable in some marbles. The deposited material is buried under new sediments and the diagenesis process begins: a complex of chemical and physical processes that convert the dissolved sediment into solid rock.
Through cohesion, compaction, redistribution and recrystallization of substances and cementation, the lithification can be reached in variable times: it can take place immediately after deposition or after millions of years.
Once formed, the sedimentary rock begins to travel: the earth's crust is in continuous evolution, and its parts, the so-called plaques, move colliding, creating the geological geometries on which we live. The rocks undergo deepening, elevations, very complex bends that transform them: in our case sedimentary rocks undergo a process called regional metamorphism.
A regional metamorphic process involves a significant volume of material which, subjected to high pressures and temperatures, changes its physiognomy and composition, depending on the source material, the duration and intensity of these processes. The sedimentary rock thus meets a transformation that leads to the recrystallization of calcium carbonate with disappearance of fossil remains and formation of crystalline calcite.
The marble is almost formed but it is not yet in its final position: the movements in the earth's crust bring the marble on the surface, or near it, ready to be extracted. It is very difficult to recognize the sedimentary rock of origin of every marble: this is because the metamorphic transformations are very intense and extensive, and because the processes can be multiple and, adding to one another, make the reconstruction of the "path" more and more difficult. of the rock.
Making examples is useless as well as disadvantageous: however, we can remember that the final composition can be very varied, depending on the different impurities present, which make each marble unique and inimitable: in fact, the name is taken from the locality of origin or color characteristics or zonatora of the marble itself.
The term is also used improperly for non-metamorphic limestone rocks but equally compact and susceptible to processing. Also the appearance is very different: the weaving (the whole of the shape, the size and the arrangement of the granules of the minerals that compose it) and the structure (the set of characters observable on a large scale) give each marble its own peculiarities and unique.
Carrara marble
Carrara marble is a type of white or blue-grey marble of high quality, popular for use in sculpture and building decor.
It is quarried in the city of Carrara located in the province of Massa and Carrara in the Lunigiana, the northernmost tip of modern-day Tuscany, Italy.
Pentelic marble
A white, fine-grain marble that has been quarried at Mt. Pentelikon north of Athens since the 1st millennium BCE. Pentelic marble was used for sculpture as well as for buildings. Pentelic marbles often contain inclusions or veins of quartz , iron oxide, graphite, mica, or pyrite. Graphite inclusions in marble, called graphitic marble, show as gray or silver flakes when polished.
Lasa marble
The White Lasa marble is characterized by a homogeneous white tint on the bottom. During its nearly 400 million years of age, limestone crystallized, becoming pure white marble. Lasa marble, unlike other types of marble, resists frost and weather, so much that even antifreeze salt is unable to corrode.
The Cache
In order to log this cache you will have to send us in private (using message center) answers in English, in the absence of answers log will be deleted.
1-Observe the Memorial at the coordinates, Do you notice the differences between the one used for the central part of the memorial and the one used for the central statues?
2-Describe in the detail the marble used for the big central statues. (grain and color)
3-According to you, what does the color of the marble at GZ depended on? (Why the marble is white?)
Take a photo with the Memorial (not a must but will be very apreciated).