Saw an article or documentary and it said something to the effect of Roman buildings heal themselves after being damaged or weather damage.
How can that be
In: Engineering
Some rock types easily dissolves in water and turn liquid. If this water then flows into an empty space and then evaporate it fills this space with the rock. This is how fossils are formed. Concrete is made with cement which does dissolve in water, but then it chemically react with the water, or with CO2 in the air, to form a type of rock that does not dissolve in water.
Romans did not get this completely right though and had a lot of rocks in it that would dissolve in water. This did make Roman concrete much weaker then what we make today. Most Roman structures that stand today are those so overbuilt that they would have been standing even without concrete, or they have been heavily repaired and modified over the years.
But a relatively recent paper have studied Roman concrete and found that even though it is much weaker and easily form cracks a lot of these cracks have been filled with the type of rock that dissolves in water. Exactly like fossils. This have restored some of the strength of the concrete. There have been some speculation if they did this on purpose and that it was not purely a result of bad processes. This have been picked up by some media sites and blog posts claiming that Roman concrete is somehow better then modern concrete because it is self healing. But this shows a lack of understanding of what concrete is and how it is used.
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