Discovering the Greek seabed statue helps counteract

This Greek athlete seems a bit pale on the lower chin. But if you know that this is the first part of a statue that has been underwater for 2,000 years, you will recognize it is still almost intact.

The ancient Greek statue was discovered in Croatian waters in 1998 - after the mineral shell created by animals should be removed.

This bronze statue was cast in Greece in the first century BC. The overall image of the statue is a popular posture in ancient Greek art: an athlete is scraping away dust and sweat from the body with a small, curved object.

The front of the 1.9-meter-tall statue has a mineralized layer of 3 to 5 cm thick, which includes animals such as mussels, oysters, or nematodes with hard shells that they make themselves.

Under the biological shell, the abraded metal is full of old-fashioned colors.

(Photo: © Vidoslav Barac (photo gallery of Croatian Conservation Institute))

'This color is related to the formation of green copper oxide on the statue, while the red color of the lipstick remains due to a layer of pure tin metal,' said Davorin Medakovic, officer of Rudjer Boskovic Research Institute in Zagreb. , said.

Croatian scientists storing the statue said that a hard-shell statue like this would help clarify how marine creatures absorb metal and thereby form their mineral shells.

Even creatures that do not have direct contact with the surface of the statue still get a small piece of metal from the statue, Crystal Growth & Design research results online, said.

In addition, the study also shows 'the tremendous impact of metal absorption on the body's metabolism, and causes their bodies to produce strange minerals in the shell.'

From the regular absorption of copper and tin, the creatures on the statue have 'digested' these metals into a shell that has an unusual ratio of aragonite and magnesium calcite, along with a small amount of quartz and feldspar.

Knowing which metals disrupt the digestive process of these organisms can help researchers apply these metals to anti-biofouling, accumulation oysters and similar organisms destroy the hull.