Scientists on DW

Thought experiment I'm hosting over at my journal, jjhunter: Come All Ye Castles, Ancient and Neglected

So: castles. Let's do a version of [the 'Earth Without People'] thought experiment with a castle, say a château (-fort or otherwise) like the Château d'Ussé in France. If you take humans out of the picture for a hundred years, what happens to that building and the land immediately surrounding it? If we were to take snapshots of particular elements at 10, 20, 50, 100 years, what would that progression look like?

I'm particularly interested in what might happening chemically / structurally to the building itself and its contents if no one's doing preventative maintenance, and how the proportions of various animal and plant populations might shift over time if there's no selective breeding / weeding /etc. going on.

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A/N: admins, can we have a tag of some kind for 'thought experiment'?