Buried metal

Jack Ogden <jack [at] striptwist__com> writes

>There are sometimes minute, very fragile meandering tubes on ancient
>buried metal objects that I have always thought of as 'worm casts'
>(though that might not be the right term). ...

Very likely these tubes are the product of filiform corrosion.  See
<URL:http://www.chem.fsu.edu/editors/STEINBOCK/projects/ffc/ffc.htm>
and corrosion texts for a discussion of this interesting phenomenon.
This could be checked by determining whether the tube material has a
metal content that is similar to or a component of the underlying
metal object.

Patrick Gallagher
Materials Preservation


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 18:8
                 Distributed: Wednesday, July 21, 2004
                        Message Id: cdl-18-8-005
                                  ***