The Mysterious Process by which Flint is Created

Here's Saskia's video: 

Here's Rachel's skeleton video from last week:

My question was about flint:

That was great!! So the trick is not to become an extinct experiment. Gotcha. Now I am going to look at your videos to see if anywhere you explain this thing I never understood which is how flints form in chalk deposits. I used to live in England and there were some chalk deposits full of really beautiful white Dolomite, but with the globules of flint. If you find them before they break into sharp shards then they look almost organic: like they're some sort of fossilised jelly-blobs. But I guess its just the silica and calcite separating at some point. But does anybody have any ideas about when and where it happens? Is it early on in the deposition when these were all separate skeletons swishing around in a kind of slurry on the sea-floor, or was it later when they came under some pressure? It seems like a violation of the second law of thermodynamics though. Another thing I used to find in Cambridgeshire were these huge fossilised shells. They were the shape of mussel shells, but inches thick.

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See Mikhail Gromov on Mathematical Description of Biological Structures for more ways in which biology makes fun of mathematicians and physicists. 

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