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"Sailing Stones" (Racetrack Playa In Death Valley, Etc.)

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Moving stones

I wasn't sure which catergory this belonged to so its here! Does anyone have any interesting links, ideas or theories on the moving stones of Death valley? For those who have never heard of them before these are stones and large boulders that appear to move of their own accord across the desert floor leaving track marks behind them. Apparently this only occurs during stormy nights. There's a picture of one in the Fortean Times image gallery:
http://www.forteantimes.com/gallery/moving_stones.shtml
The claim that they only move during storms suggests some kind of geological or possibly an acoustic process is occuring. Maybe the sides of the valley somehow channel thunder in such a way that it makes the stones move along the ground. But if this could be the case then wouldn't the stones bounce? The track marks suggest they are dragged. Also does anyone know if this phenomenon has been recorded elsewhere in the World or is it restricted to Death valley?
 
when I read your post I thought of boulders rolling (flintstone style) across the desert but those things are flat! Could the stones have metallic elements in their makeup that could suggest a magnetic field thing going on? Or maybe a hollow earth trick in the manner of paper clips moved on a card with magnets?

also found this page on the rocks tooThe Mystery of the Rocks on the Racetrack at Death Valley
 
Wasn't this covered years ago in Arther C Clark's Mysterious World?

The combination of the correct weather conditions, i.e. low friction ground surface during rain & high winds. Meant that the stones would slide when the wind & rain were favourable!!!!!!
 
yeah, perhpaps the magentic charge is always there, but the rocks can only move through wet muddy soil, instead of hard dry soil, thus you need a storm to see movement. this is understandable too concidering death valley is a ways below sea level, so it makes it closer to the earth's magnetic core.

i always did love magnets....
 
Mentioned on another thread I think, but fairly near me (in the cotswolds) are the Rollright stones:-

http://www.rollright.demon.co.uk/

Similar themes as illustrated below

The main circle of stones is called the King's Men. It is difficult to count the stones (legend says it is impossible) but most people arrive at a number between 70 and 80. In a nearby field there is a large, solitary stone called the King Stone (above, left), and a few hundred yards away is a group of stones called The Whispering Knights (right). All the stones are weathered into grotesque shapes, as rotton and riddled with holes as old timber.

The legend is that a king and his army came to conquer Britain, but when they arrived at Rollright, Mother Shipton of Shipton-under-Wychwood (a protagonist in many local legends) appeared before the king and said

Seven long strides thou shalt take,
And if Long Compton thou shalt see,
King of England thou shalt be.
The king saw no problem with this, but before he could complete his steps a hill rose up before him obscuring Long Compton, and the witch announced truimphantly

As Long Compton thou canst not see
King of England thou shalt not be
Rise up stick and stand still stone
For King of England thou shall be none
Thou and thy men hoar stones shall be
And I myself an elder tree.
The king, his men and his knights were turned to stone, and it is claimed that the witch-elder can be found in a nearby hedge (highly probable given the ubiquity of elder trees in hedgerows).

There is a great deal of folklore associated with the stones. Young women were rumoured to touch the King stone with their breasts at midnight for fertility. Fairies live under the stones. The stones dance. They go down to the stream to drink. The witch elder bleeds when cut. Witches have met there since time immemorial. There is no doubt that modern neopagans do meet there, and there are many accounts of nightime visitors coming across strange goings-on. Visitors should note that the main circle of the Kings Men is privately owned, and midnight frivolity could land you in trouble.
Click to expand...

taken from the site http://www.digital-brilliance.com/hyperg/history/rollrite.htm
 
Hi,

I was on holiday in the Western States recently and during an excursion around Death Valley, California, intended to visit the famous mysterious moving stones at Racetrack Playa.

For anybody who's unfamiliar with this phenomenon see:

Racetrack Playa Geology

However, time was getting on when we reached the start of the long and slippery cinder road from the Ubehebe crater to the playa, we reluctantly gave up our diversion.

So we headed off past Scotty's Castle, over the border into Nevada on Route 267 NW towards Scotty's Junction.

Half way along this road we noticed a dry lakebed right next to the road on the left and, thinking about the racetrack, got out to have a look to see if there would be anything similar here.

Sure enough, there on the lake bed were stones with trails highlighted beautifully in the evening light.

See my photos at:

My Photo Album

(Click on the thumbnail and change the view to Normal for the best view.)

My question is twofold - how common is this phenomenon and, if uncommon, why is this particular lake bed not marked up as a tourist attraction - Nevada's answer to California's Racetrack Playa, being that these moving stones are only about 50 yards from the side of a main road and therefore very easy to reach?

Cheers,
Mark Jobling
 
Nice pictures! There's nothing like the light out in the SW desert.
 
stones on the move

I lived in southern Cailf for years I think that they don't list alot of places because of land rights and such so much land is govn't petition out there.. but Its cool to just go exploring anyway with friends if you take all the precautions of course..we always went romping in the deserts/and mts. of Calif./Nev., taking telescopes sometimes /camping /looking for stuff its cool ..
 
Cheers, I like this post lots. The pictures are well good and the content more original than most, - your link you gave is my only bookmark in days.
And there is a unexpected extra if you'd like to check it out..here is the text from that site....

.....What makes these rocks skid as much as 880 meters (2890 ft.) across the flat playa surface? Recent scientific sleuthing provides some answers.



It stops there and moves on to the next section. Where are the answers they refer to? Were they there when you visited that site? Have they slid onto the next site? Abduction? just plain criminal?
To be honest, I just don't know. Maybe we'll never know. Or maybe we will. But for certain I'll keep checking.

But it genuinely is an interesting site so thanks again for the link!l
 
If you click on the "Dig Deeper" icon, it give more info.

The theory mentioned there is that when the playa becomes muddy, strong winds simply blow the rocks along the slippery surface.

Another theory I've read is that when the surface becomes wet ant a thin layer of ice forms, a slab of ice with the stone embedded in it moves.

Either way, no-one has ever witnessed the stones moving.

Cheers,
Mark
 
thank you, I found the info, and I'll read it more fully later.
One mystery solved for me that as Mo from the Simpsons would say 'is educational and it makes you laugh'.
 
Moving rocks at Racetrack Playa

This is something I've always wondered about.

http://www.desertusa.com/mag99/july/stories/race1.html

So these rocks seem to scoot on the ground on their own. The most-accepted scientific explaination is that the rocks are blown by the wind, but people who have been there say the tracks they leave go in all different directions. If the wind is blowing them, wouldn't they all move in the same direction then? What do you think?
 
fiveleafclover: I've merged your post with the main thread on this - I hope the resources that have already been posted go some way to helping with some of your questions. ;)
 
Another article, but nothing really new, it seems:

Real-life rolling stones creep across Death Valley in California
These are the incredible pictures that reveal a bizarre event that is rocking the science world – the real-life rolling stones.
Published: 7:00AM GMT 18 Nov 2009

Amid the eerie silence and the intense 50C heat of California's Death Valley these roaming rocks appear to patrol the desert.

The rocks, some as heavy as 250lbs, move unaided in bizarre straight line patterns across the ultra-flat surface of the valley.

Scientists believe the pebbly phenomenon is caused by a melting-pot of specific weather conditions.

Studies suggest a combination of 90mph winds, ice formations at night and thin layers of wet clay on the surface of the desert all combine to push them along.

Photographer Mike Byrne, 40, has spent years documenting the mysterious movements of the stones.

As his pictures show these real-life rolling stones leave trails across the sand in places almost untouched by man.

He said: "Some of these rocks are as heavy as a person, it is really is strange to imagine them gliding across the desert like this.

"They must be the original real-life rolling stones, they just keep moving through the sand and I don't think anyone has really 100 per cent worked it out yet.

"Most of the stones are found on an old lake bed, known as the Racetrack Playa, where the ground is particularly flat.

"It has been documented over the years and it is something very special to witness, although I know climatologists believe the phenomenon could disappear in a few years as the temps continue to rise.

"One of the strongest theories about what the rocks move is that water rising from beneath the surface of the sand is pushed by the wind creating a surface the rocks can move along."

Death Valley is the lowest point in the US, at 282 feet below sea level.

It is almost completely flat and holds the record for the second highest temperature ever recorded on earth, a blistering 58C.

In the 1990s a study by a team of scientists lead by Professor John Reid, from Hampshire College, Massachusetts, attempted to explain the rocks movement.

His study concluded that the rocks may be moved when they become embedded in sheets of ice forming at night on the surface of the sand.

As the sand melts Prof Reid said that the rocks were moved along by the ice and wind forming the incredible patterns.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthn ... ornia.html
 
The moving rocks of death valley

Is one of the first Fortean things I ever remember sparking my interest waaaay back when I was but a little Poultice.

Now, while I am not offering to stump up the cash for this enterprise..

Seeing how cheaply you can set up webcams these days, surley it would not be hugely expensive to set a few up in the hotspots and leave em running for a few weeks? Cone on! Scientific funding is given to much less exciting endeavours every year!
 
Surely the funnest Forteana fenomena!

Frank Fraser Darling records boulders as large as his head moved by the wind during his stay on N Rona.

No algae filled mud or nice surfaces there.

just `peel the turf off` wind.
 
I'm a little surprised that nobody has set up a webcam or time-lapse camera. That would help to shed light on the mystery.
 
Mythopoeika said:
I'm a little surprised that nobody has set up a webcam or time-lapse camera. That would help to shed light on the mystery.
Click to expand...

Maybe they did but the stones were too clever for them?
 
I saw a video about this: combination of wind and a thin sheet of ice that forms in the night in winter. Makes sense.
Physicists studying the phenomenon in 1995 found that winds blowing on playa surfaces can be compressed and intensified. They also found that boundary layers (the region just above ground where winds are slower due to ground drag) on these surfaces can be as low as 2 inches (5 cm). This means that stones just a few inches high feel the full force of ambient winds and their gusts, which can reach 90 mph (145 km/h) in winter storms. Such gusts are thought to be the initiating force while momentum and sustained winds keep the stones moving, possibly as fast as a moderate run (only half the force required to start a stone sailing is needed to keep it in motion).

Wind and ice both are the favored hypothesis for these mysterious sliding rocks. Noted in Don J. Easterbrook's "Surface Processes and Landforms", he mentioned that because of the lack of parallel paths between some rock paths, this could be caused by the breaking up of ice resulting in alternate routes. Even though the ice breaks up into smaller blocks, it is still necessary for the rocks to slide.
Click to expand...
 
gncxx said:
Mythopoeika said:
I'm a little surprised that nobody has set up a webcam or time-lapse camera. That would help to shed light on the mystery.
Click to expand...

Maybe they did but the stones were too clever for them?
Click to expand...

I did read in an article that they aren't allowed to do that as it is a national park. But that doesn't sound quite right to me - David Attenborough has filmed in NP all over the place.

Wind and ice do make the most sense, except for the fact (?) that there's rarely ice and the wind blows only in one direction (or so it says) and the stones move in all kinds of ways - including uphills.
 
I bumped into this article today. It looks like the consensus is still some kind of ice formation which helps the rocks to move, but they've come up with a slightly different theory - that the stones become embedded in ice which then floats on a layer of warmer water/mud, so not so much wind power is needed to move them as first thought.

Smithsonian Magazine
[...]Still, ice remained the primary hypothesis for decades. John Reid, a Hampshire College professor, took student groups to the playa annually from 1987 to 1994 to study the stones. Because of the many parallel tracks, he came away convinced that they were locked together in large ice sheets that were blown by strong winds.

But Paula Messina, a geologist at San Jose State, used GPS to create a digital map of the tracks and found that most were, in fact, not parallel. Furthermore, wind-based models were thrown into doubt when researchers attempted to calculate the wind speeds necessary to move the ice sheets. The lowest figures were hundreds of miles per hour.

Enter Ralph Lorenz, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University. In 2006, as part of a project with NASA, Lorenz was setting up a network of miniaturized weather stations in Death Valley. The weather is harsh enough there to serve an analogue for weather conditions on Mars. But then he discovered the sailing stones. “I was intrigued, as everyone is, and I had this instrumentation I was using in desert locations during the summer,” he says. “We realized we could use it during the winter and try to understand what the conditions really are at the playa.”

As the research team studied weather patterns on the Racetrack, they also looked for rocks that seemed to move on their own in other environments. Scanning the scientific literature, Lorenz learned that the buoyancy of ice helped float boulders onto arctic tidal beaches, creating barricades along the shore. The scientists began putting this idea together with what they saw on the Racetrack. “We saw one instance where there was a rock trail and it looked like it hit another rock and bounced, but the trail didn't go all the way up to the other rock, like it was repelled somehow,” says Lorenz. “We thought if there was a collar of ice around the rock, then it might be easy to imagine why it might bounce.”

Eventually, Lorenz employed a tried-and-true method for testing his nascent idea: the kitchen-table experiment. “I took a small rock, and put it in a piece of Tupperware, and filled it with water so there was an inch of water with a bit of the rock sticking out,” he says. “I put it in the freezer, and that then gave me a slab of ice with a rock sticking out of it.” He flipped the rock-ice hybrid upside down and floated it in a tray of water with sand on the bottom. By merely blowing gently on the ice, he realized, he could send the embedded rock gliding across the tray, scraping a trail in the sand as it moved. After decades of theoretical calculations by countless scientists, the answer seemed to be sitting on his tabletop.

Lorenz and his team presented their new model in a 2011 paper. “Basically, a slab of ice forms around a rock, and the liquid level changes so that the rock gets floated out of the mud,” he explains. “It’s a small floating ice sheet which happens to have a keel facing down that can dig a trail in the soft mud.” Calculations show that, in this scenario, the ice causes virtually no friction on the water, so the stones are able to glide with just a slight breeze. The team argues that their model accounts for the movement far better than any other, since it doesn’t require massive wind speeds or enormous ice sheets.
[...]
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I remember this was one of the first things that got me into Fortean things, like mr poultice. I used to stare at the photos of them with their little trails behind and just wonder! It'd still be great to actually see it though. :D
 
I think it was a program on discovery channel called "weird or what?" where they realised that the combination of strong wind and rain would cause the rocks to get blow across the ground, the rain and the combination of the ground surface meant that not much friction needed to be overcome for the wind to move the rocks.
 
These folks are claiming they've finally solved the mystery of the stones' movements ...

High-Tech Sleuthing Cracks Mystery of Death Valley's Moving Rocks

August 27, 2014 02:00pm ET

The first witnesses to an enduring natural mystery are an engineer, a biologist and a planetary scientist who met thanks to a remote weather station.

This odd group has captured the first video footage of Death Valley's sailing stones creeping across Racetrack Playa. For a century, these eerie rocks and their long, graceful trails have stumped visitors and scientists. The boulders of black dolomite appear to move on their own, sliding uphill across the playa's flat lakebed. The trails are the only evidence the rocks move. No one has ever seen them set sail. [Video: Sailing Stones of Death Valley Seen in Action]

Lacking direct evidence, explanations for this geologic puzzle ran the gamut, from Earth's magnetic field to gale-force winds to slippery algae. Now, with video, time-lapse photographs and GPS tracking of Racetrack Playa's moving rocks, the mystery has finally been solved.

Jagged plates of thin ice, resembling panels of broken glass, bulldoze the rocks across the flooded playa, the scientists reveal today (Aug. 27) in the journal PLOS One. Driven by gentle winds, the rocks seem to hydroplane atop the fluffy, wet mud.

"It's a wonderful Goldilocks phenomenon," said lead study author Richard Norris. "Ponds like this are vanishingly rare in Death Valley, and it may be a decade between heavy enough rain or snowfall events to make a substantial pond," said Norris, a paleobiologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California.

....

More details at:

SOURCE: http://www.livescience.com/47585-death- ... rocks.html
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Couldn't find a thread on this!

Has the mystery finally been solved?

These are the “sliding rocks” or “sailing stones” of Death Valley. First documented by miners back in the 1900s, these rocks range from pebbles to 600-pound (272-kilogram) boulders and seem to move of their own accord. The only evidence of their activity is a series of long, perplexing trails left in the valley’s dried mud.

Scientists have been trying to solve the mystery of the sliding rocks since 1948, and have since proposed all manner of explanation: dust devils, flooding, ice sheets, hurricane-force winds, and algal films.

But thanks to new photographic and meteorological evidence presented by Richard Norris of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and James Norris of Interwoof, we may finally have a conclusive answer as to what makes the stones stir. The researchers’ findings were published today in the journal PLOS ONE.

A Goldilocks Phenomenon

According to Norris, a geological oceanographer and paleontologist, Death Valley’s rocks move under a delicate mix of water, ice, sun, and wind. Norris and his cousin were able to document the rock movements by inserting GPS tags into chunks of limestone and syncing their movements with readings taken from a custom-built weather station.

Unlike one of the previous explanations, which had thick ice capturing the rocks and carrying them along like a miniature glacier, Norris said their evidence shows that thin ice floes break up and pile against the rocks. This creates enough friction to cause the rocks to skim across the muddy surface of a temporary pond. If you were there to see it, the rocks would look like ice-breaker ships plowing through sea ice—though in this instance, it’s the ice that’s moving the ships.

But the conditions have to be just right, what Norris called a sort of Goldilocks phenomenon. If the ice is too thick, or the day is too sunny, or the wind isn’t steady enough, then nothing happens.

Oh, and you have to have standing water—a rare phenomenon in itself for an area that receives less than 2 inches of rainfall annually.

“The process of ice breaking up and shoving rocks around happens every year if you go up into Saskatchewan or Ontario, but you don’t normally associate it with a hot, dry place like Death Valley,” said Norris. “And yet here’s the same kind of process unfolding occasionally—very occasionally—in this place that we associate with a very different kind of climate.”
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http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com ... your-eyes/
 
I'm sure if someone had mentioned that the plain the stones were in flooded periodically, to a level of about half the height of the stones. And that the water got cold enough to freeze partially, more people might have been able to work out what was going on.

Instead, it was typically presented as "Rocks move about the plain, but no-one knows how...Ooo-spooky!" with insufficient information. I suppose that's something it has in common with many* Fortean phenomena - not so much that they're supernatural, it's just that we don't have all the information to work out what's the natural solution.

* - Note I said "many", not "all". I don't want to sidetrack into a lengthy discussion of what is truly Fortean versus Supernatural versus Natural versus Mundane. That belongs on a different thread.
 
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