"But before we get into that, let's go over the two main parts of a curling rock: the running surface and the striking surface. The former is a ring on the bottom of the rock that skids across the ice, and the latter is a band around the sides of the rock that collides with other rocks (ideally knocking an opponent's rock off the bull's-eye or nudging your team's closer to it). Each surface needs specific properties to do its job."
"To find out, Scientific American spoke with Derek Leung of the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, a mineralogist and avid curler who used to compete for Team Hong Kong. Leung has married his two interests by doing the first mineralogical analyses of curling rocks since 1890. It's been more than a hundred years since we had looked at them, he says, so he wanted to see what modern science could tell us."
Curling stones, roughly 40 pounds, come almost exclusively from Ailsa Craig in Scotland and the Trefor granite quarry in Wales because of their unique material properties. Each stone has two functional parts: a running surface that skids across the ice and a striking surface that collides with other stones, and each surface requires distinct physical characteristics. Ailsa Craig supplied stones since the early 19th century and Trefor became important after World War II. Recent mineralogical analyses by a researcher-curler represent the first systematic study of curling stones since 1890 to identify what makes those sources especially suitable and whether alternatives exist.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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