Posted on 08/28/2014 10:20:39 AM PDT by Red Badger
It's a geological enigma that's had scientists speculating for half a century. But the mystery behind Death Valley's 'Wandering Stones' has finally been uncovered.
It was previously unknown what caused the rocks to move across Racetrack Playa, a desert lake bed in the mountains above California's Death Valley, leaving their distinctive trails behind them.
But researchers have witnessed a thin layer of water freezing over the lake, before breaking into sheets the thickness of a window pane and nudging the rocks as they were blown by the breeze.
“It’s a delight to be involved in sorting out this kind of public mystery,” Richard Norris, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, told Nature.
Richard led the research with his cousin James Norris, an engineer at Interwoof in Santa Barbara, California and their work was published in PLoS ONE1.
The research team started their work in 2011, setting up a weather station and time-lapse cameras as well as attaching GPS trackers to rocks.
But the breakthrough came in December 2013 when they visited their site and witnessed a large ice sheet covering around a third of the 4.5 kilometre stretch.
After a few days camping at the site, the team heard the start of the process as the ice began to crack.
“It was a beautiful sunny day, and there began to be rippled melt pools in front of us,” Richard Norris said.
“At 11.37am, very abruptly, there was a pop-pop-crackle all over the place in front of us — and I said to my cousin, ‘This is it.’"
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
They gots video.............
It took 50 years to discover this? Hmmm.....
“... they managed to capture film footage of the enigmatic event.” Why didn’t they post the video?
Keith actually looks human in that pic.
uh...how does the water pool under the rock and then freeze?
An oceanographer and an engineer? With a weather station, timelapse cameras, and GPS trackers?
And in the end, solving this 50-year-old mystery comes down to a couple of buddies camping for a few days and watching what happens?
(Did it take 50 years to get the grant to pay for all this? :-)
For the same reason that dogs drag their arse across your carpet, their rock butt is inflamed
Bush’s fault
The mud under the rocks has fine mica flakes mix with fine clay particles and is very slippery when wet. The ice pushes the rock over this very slippery surface. The Race Track is in a valley where high winds develop. I’ve seen the tracks and for many years geologists have thought that it was just the wind load pushing the rocks.
That was not the statement of the (truncated - but that matters not) sentence I quoted. My rebuttel stands! :-)
(A halfway sentient journalist - ok, fat chance - might have written that it was not fully known what external force might’ve caused those rocks to move.)
Now that’s funny.
“Yeah but the stones they filmed aren’t the real alien stones. “
You need to keep quiet about that. What’s your Supervisors number?
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