Marble is one of the natural stones that is made into tiles to be placed in places of luxury such as hotels, palaces and homes around the world. In this article, I will give you an overview of how marble is mined in quarries.

Before Marble is mined, it first must be found by prospectors. There are numerous marble quarries around the world but the rock is most prevalent in Canada, Italy, Germany, Spain, India, America and China. In the olden days, prospectors would go round on horseback looking for signs of minerals. They would look in creek beds, along ridge lines, on hill tops and in stream trap sites looking for colour or gold in silt, just like you see in the cowboy movies.

Once the marble has been located, a quarry must be built to excavate the rock. The excavation involves simply cutting huge blocks of marble from the earth. The rock is cut out in rectangular blocks to allow the marble to be shaped into tiles and other useful objects later on.

As I'm sure you can understand. Marble is no light object so cannot be transported on horseback or in the boot of your car. Huge trucks are used to remove the marble from the quarry and in some of the larger quarries, train lines are set up so the rock can be moved easily by train to the processing plant.

At the processing plant, the marble is cut with huge saws (with blades up to 18ft wide!) into more manageable blocks. It can sometimes take a week to cut a block of marble into usable sections and marble with different properties reacts differently to the saw so the operator must be highly skilled.

Once it has been cut to shape, the marble is put through polishing and epoxy processes and is then shipped out to stores to be sold.