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Ferruginous Gravel, Australia

Gallery of Concretions. Courtesy Robert van de Graaff, Van de Graaff & Associates, all rights reserved

Concretions are hard bodies that form in sediments before they become sedimentary rocks. Slow chemical changes, perhaps related to microbial activity, cause minerals to come out of the groundwater and seal the sediment together. Most often the cementing mineral is calcite, but the brown, iron-bearing carbonate mineral siderite is also common. Some concretions have a central particle, such as a fossil, that triggered the cementation. Others have a void, perhaps where a central object dissolved away, and others have nothing special inside, maybe because the cementation was imposed from outside.

A concretion consists of the same material as the rock around it, plus the cementing mineral, whereas a nodule (like flint nodules in limestone) is composed of different material.

Concretions can be shaped like cylinders, sheets, nearly perfect spheres, and everything in between. Most are spherical. In size, they can range from as small as gravel to as large as a truck. This gallery shows concretions that range in size from small to large.

These gravel-size concretions of iron-bearing (ferruginous) material are from Sugarloaf Reservoir Park, Victoria, Australia.