It is hard to avoid using the phrase “scientists have discovered ….” But here we go again: Scientists have discovered a way to make concrete last for 16,000 years.

This is not, as on first inspection it might seem, the environmental nightmare it sounds like. What Matthieu Vandamme from the Université Paris-Est and Franz-Josef Ulm from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have done is work out why concrete creeps, or gradually deforms over time.

The answer is published in PNAS this week and appears to be the way that calcium-silicate-hydrate crystals rearrange themselves at the nanoscale.

This process can’t be stopped, the researchers say, but can be slowed. Slowed so that concrete will last 16,000 years, says GreentechMedia.

So what is creep? Well, according to Ulm, it’s like chewing gum. Gum will stretch and compress if a constant force is applied, Science News tells us, and this, says Ulm is what concrete does, but at a much larger scale.

The hope for creep-free concrete in future is now in the hands of nanoengineers who with the help of this latest research might be able to come up with an additive that slows the creep right down.