Sciacca Mystery the End pt.V

From the sea, in 15 years of work, non continuous as we have seen, well over 14 million kg of coral were extracted! An unimaginable amount for the human mind to grasp. But how much is still there, in the sea? And how much is buried underneath the lava that must have spewed out of the mouths of these volcanoes in the course of millenniums? And even before?
An engineer friend of mine, one who builds roads, amused himself making a calculation: with such a mass of coral, we could have paved the entire highway from Trapani to Trieste!
I submitted the results of this final analysis to Margherita Superchi who, as I expected, said: “I would like to do a Knoop hardness test.”
Perhaps many are familiar with the Mohs hardness scale. This is an empirical meter, a simple enough device, that we owe to Austrian naturalist Friederich Mohs, who lived between the 1700s and 1800s and that is used to assess the hardness of materials that exist in nature. The scale starts with talk, the softest of materials, and ends with diamonds, which are perhaps the hardest. According to the Mohs scale coral is level 3, a material that can be scratched using a steel tip.
Since 1839 (when Mohs died) new methods have been experimented that are more precise and scientifically accurate. The most appropriate to our case, according to Margherita Superchi, was the Knoop hardness measurement, from the name of another researcher, Frederick Knoop, who tested it for the first time in 1939 in the laboratories of the National Bureau of Standards, in the United States.
So I prepared the corals, and sent them to the Institute of Science and Technology of Ceramic Materials in Faenza, the pride and joy of the National Research Council.
A little more than one week later we received the results. They may be difficult to understand by those not familiar with this work but in simple terms the results confirm that, in fact, the coral of Sciacca, in addition to changing its color and basic components, also modified its hardness.
The Coral of Sciacca has no more secrets, at least concerning its origin and morphological characteristics.
Now I know why it “chimed”. My research is finished.
And to think that it all began with a child’s game...
The conversations with Margherita Superchi, the sample sent to the CISGEM, the first analyses with the Raman. Then the chemical composition by Robert Bodnar, when the going really got serious! And the radiocarbon datings… one, two, three, four. And, finally, the Knoop hardness tests.
A long road. Long and fascinating.
Someone might wonder: what for? I don’t have the right answer to that.
If this someone exists I could say that many of man’s discoveries in the course of millenniums were the result of a thirst for knowledge, of curiosity, of the desire to know what lies around the corner. That’s what it was like for me, and with the mystery of the Sciacca Coral.

The End.
[text taken with license from the author Giuseppe Rajola from the book Sciacca Mystery]

Enjoy!