How Is Granite Quarried?
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Finding Granite
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The first step in quarrying granite is to find it. The stone, which is hard and ranges in color from pink to black, is often shot through with quartz crystals. It's fairly common in large chunks and outcroppings seen above ground. Granite that is quarried, however, must come from larger deposits beneath the earth to be considered commercially viable.
First Steps in Quarrying
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Once the granite is located, it's cut out of the earth in gigantic chunks (often 30 by 30 by 12 feet) and then split into smaller, 20-ton slabs before being removed individually from the quarry. The rough cut granite is often taken by truck or hoisted on a crane, then transported to the sawing room.
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Cutting it Down to Size
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In the sawing room, the granite is reduced further by a huge, diamond-tipped saw. Once the granite has passed through this phase, it moves to the cutting shed if it's being turned into something even smaller, such as street curbs. Round domes and curved curbing is still cut by the hands of the workers, but often granite is left in longer slabs for use in the construction of buildings rather than being reduced to smaller pieces.
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