Walking rocks in the desert leave tracks
Giant stones really do shuffle across the desert floor. Here's how it happens!
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- Giant stones really do shuffle across the desert floor. Here's how it happens!
- Even a light breeze provides enough shove against these ice sheets to move the heavy boulders.
- Once the water evaporates and the ice melts, only the rock and its deep furrow remain in the cracked earth.
The massive rocks of Racetrack Playa move because of window-pane thin sheets of ice, not gravity or heavy winds. Many of these stones weigh over 700 pounds, yet they leave trails hundreds of feet long in the dry mud.
For nearly a century, no one saw them move. Theories ranged from magnetic fields to alien intervention. The truth was finally captured using GPS sensors and time-lapse cameras during a rare weather event.
When a few inches of rain flood the playa and freeze at night, they form sheets of ice as thin as glass. When the sun rises, the ice breaks into large floating panels.
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