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A
natural stone bridge,
interwoven
with the Hindu mythology - the Ram Setu Bridge – also known as
Adam's bridge is a long string of coral reef rocks that connects
the
Rameswaram
Island in Tamil Nadu, India to Mannar Island, off the north-western
coast of Sri
Lanka.
This bridge is believed to have been built across the sea for the
Hindu God Sri
Rama
by Hanuman and his associates when they marched across
a small strip of sea
to
Lanka to fight King Ravanna and bring back Seetha
(Sri
Rama's wife)
who was in siege.
In
the Sanskrit epic Ramayana,
it is mentioned that they jerrybuilt
a
passable
stone bridge across
the sea to cross over to the island country.
These
big fragments of reef rocks were exposed after the worst devastating
Tsunami that struck the eastern coast of India and other places on
December26, 2004.These
huge coral reef rocks actually float in the water and never get
submerged because of lots of void spaces in them. It may
be
possible for humans to use these series of floating stones and
cross a huge water body.
At
Rameswaram I myself saw in some places huge stones weighing more
than 30 kg floating in big water tanks without getting submerged.
After
observation
first hand logical explanation is - invariably almost all the
floating stones are coral reef rocks made of calcium carbonate. They
have lots of very small hollow spaces once occupied by colonies of
tiny animals that
normally
build the reef in the
coastal marine
waters; most reefs were
built by stony corals
eons ago.
The
numerous small air cavities
in the rocks
are not even and are found to occur unevenly
inside them and also on the surface. Further, the weight of the
water displaced by them is more than their own weight. As
for buoyancy, the
following inference can be made:
Almost
all floating stones at
Rameswaram
are coral reef rocks with variable density and air cavities.
The
floating rock segment exposed to the viewer above
the surface has
more air cavities and less density.
On the other hand,
the bottom segment (immersed
in water)
has more density and less air
cavities.
Further,
it is likely, it may be due to salinity of the floating medium -
water.
No
matter how you drop the stone into
the water, it automatically realigns itself in such a way that less
denser
portion with more air cavities is turned towards the viewer.
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