[Terrapreta] The Reason for Pottery Shards in Terra Preta. Re: Char and compost ( was Char made made under pressurized conditions? )

[lou gold]

Another good guess, I believe.

If you look at the images in the BBC documentary of the "cut-away" terra
preta dig, it really looks like a honeycomb structure.

And the density of shards is amazing. I wondered why? What function and why
so many? If you consider the population densities reported by Francisco de
Orellana (for example, a stretch of river where people were living
house-pressed-to-house for 20 miles) and the normal volumes of human waste,
it is easy to imagine huge amounts of pottery shards.

It seems to all be coming together, thanks to everyones' speculation.

On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 7:29 AM, <MMBTUPR at aol.com> wrote:

>                from          Lewis L Smith
>
> The case of the pottery shards and the role of urine in terra preta is
> fascinating.  Congratulations to all on a fine piece of "detective work".
>
> However, a question sticks in my mind. Did the presence of lots of shards
> in terra preta accidentally contribute to the effectiveness of the ongoing
> chemical processes ?
>
> In Puerto Rico, researchers at the Bacardí rum distillery learned that
> microbes which "snip" big molecules into smaller ones, like to "sit down"
> while they do their work. So they greatly improved the efficiency of the
> Company's digester for distillation slops by placing a honeycomb like
> structure within in it. Without taking up a lot of volume, this structure
> greatly increased the available surface area to which microbes could attach
> themselves.
>
> I also recall from research into ocean-thermal energy conversion by a
> former client, that there was a considerable loss of transfer efficiency in
> the heat exchangers because the microbes in the sea water like to attach
> themselves to the available surfaces rather than float around.
>
> [ The solution turned out to be pretty simple. Every so often clean the
> insides of the heat exchangers with a pots-and-pans cleanser, such as Ajax.
> ]
>
> Query :  Is it possible that the surfaces of the shards contributed to the
> terra-preta processes in an analogous fashion ?
>
> Cordially.
>
>
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