A land of austere beauty, bone dry desert, extremes of both heat and cold. We see rock movement through unknown forces until now. An hour’s drive off paved roads lies Racetrack Playa, known for the nearly flat mud cracked surface of the dry lake, where we can see rock movement through unknown forces until now.
Rock movement
Most people suggest that movement is driven by hurricane-force, winds blowing over rain-slicked mud. Others suggest that floating ice sheets lift rocks, and describe remarkably similar trails.
Death Valley holds the global record for the highest recorded air temperature but the low altitude and searing heat. No one can explain how 700-pound rocks move as far as 1,500 feet across the valley floor.
Some of these rocks are heavier. They can easily be three to four hundred pounds. They’ve actually been pushed by some force across these dry lake beds.
Somehow it moved. Some leave trails hundreds of yards long, sort of parallel. It’s really exceptional for rocks to move for some reason by themselves.
What’s going on here? These weird looping rocks are not a new phenomenon. They’ve been happening on the dry lake bed for so long. Locals call it racetrack playa.
The first reference is around the 1850s when they would mention these rocks with these long snake-like trails behind them, the cracked mud.
No human moved these stones. In the search for answers, researchers scour the historical record for clues and find tantalizing evidence in ancient Native America.
One of the claims on how these rocks mysteriously are electromagnetic fields generated by UFOs. Historically there have been a lot of UFO phenomena in and around Death Valley.
There’s a relationship between UFOs and rocks that seemed to move mysteriously. All those sightings of strange flying objects have been reported in the area for many years.
Suspected UFO activity has never been caught on camera until now in January 2013. Photographer Gavin Heffernan is shooting a night sky time-lapse above the rocks of Death Valley.
Essentially very long exposure photography lets as much light as possible in and allows us to see things in the sky that our naked eye would not actually reveal to us.
So with the combination of Death Valley’s unbelievable dark skies and with this long exposure all of a sudden, we’re looking a little further into space than you really can imagine.
Heffernan captures a trail in the sky circling above them. Wondering what was that none of us had heard anything. None of us had seen something so significant circling three times over.
Could this be the mysterious cause of Death Valley’s wandering rocks? Planetary scientist Ralph Lorenz doesn’t think so. There’s actually a clue to this process and that is that in the Canadian Arctic all those can be drafted by ice.
You can have acres of ice for the wind to drag on that magnifies. The wind forces on a rock and then can bulldoze it. But Death Valley is not an icy wasteland. It’s the hottest place on earth.
A NASA-funded research team sets up an experiment to track the rocks on racetrack playa for ten years.
After two years of wait, their patience paid off until very recently nobody had seen the rocks move. But in fact, that changed in winter.
The extreme temperatures of Death Valley can work both ways. Death Valley is a desert. But during winter, especially at night, it freezes.
When that lake froze over on several occasions rocks have been seen to move sheet ice forms around the rocks.
The ice thaws and it breaks up. Some of the cleans form a kind of floating lifesaver on the slippery mud of the lake bed.
A gentle push from the wind is enough to slide the rocks along the valley floor. If the ice is somehow floating on the rocks, then you hardly need any wind at all.
Experiment one
In 1976, Bob Sharp and Dwight Carey tested the idea that large ice sheets might move stones. The experiment was done to create a corral about 15 feet in diameter in which two rocks were placed to see if ice had something to do with this movement.
What happened during that time period is one of the rocks moved out, and the other one stayed, so at least at that time scientists were convinced that ice probably didn’t play a role in the movement of every stone.
Experiment two
Scientists then installed a weather station, they also embedded GPS units on rocks, and waited for two years. Jim Norris explains- my business partner and I designed a custom GPS recorder, a little module about three inches in diameter, that we can put into stones. And we built fifteen of those. Those stones are deployed out on the Playa as we speak.
Want to know about types of rocks
Final rock movement
In late November 2013, rain and snow created a shallow pond on the southern third of the playa. They observed rocks in motion on December 4th, 20th, 21st, and January 9. The days dawn clear and cold with a light breeze.
In the morning the pond was covered with floating ice, sunlight formed melt pools between large areas of the still-frozen pond. Ice in the center of the playa melted first. Water was blown onto the shore causing the remaining floating ice to move.
Abruptly, just before noon, the ice broke up into large moving sheets, popping and crackling all over the pond surface. In the deeper part of the pond, moving ice began to splinter and break up leaving wakes of open water and ice chips downstream of each rock.
Large ice panels, hundreds of feet across, battered some rocks into motion. By good luck and with a long camera lens scientists caught some rocks moving on January 9th.
There are a series of stationary rocks not engaged by ice and there is a moving stone. And it’s off.
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Their scientists saw a time-lapse set of images at about the natural speed of the rock. It moves in fits and starts pushed by the ice panel and finally and briefly gets going. Movement is so slow that it is easy to miss particularly if there are no stationary rocks nearby to act as reference points.
Months later when the pond was gone because it moved several more times. In a sped-up version, the rock quickly stops moving as it disengages from the ice, and the ice panel drifts out of view.
In December and January, ice pushed up and over rocks but the trails were initially invisible beneath the muddy water. By early afternoon, the shallow pond had been blown away revealing more than 60 rock trails all remarkably similar.
GPS rocks also moved and some scribed trails were over 700 feet long. Rocks moved only 2 to 25 meters a minute. As evening came on, the wind slackened and the water flowed back to the south refilling the pond around the rocks.
By February, the pond had dried out revealing the inscribed surface of the racetrack. In the two and a half months there was a movement of rocks.
Dick Norris says, To me, the most remarkable things about this are that rocks move first of all very slowly, only at a very slow pace like that. And that this happens in the middle of the day when the sun is shining and it’s just simply beautiful out here.
We had thought before we began the study of the racetrack phenomenon that this must happen during howling winds. times of really miserable weather conditions.
When you really wouldn’t want to be out here and that was why the phenomenon had never been observed before because the conditions were simply too nasty for anyone to be willingly out here. Rocks are driven by surprisingly thin ice. Indeed most of the ice is no thicker than a windowpane and clear as glass.
Rocks move through a combination of a shallow pond, ice, light breezes, and sun to set them in motion. Ponds, in particular, are rare in Death Valley. For now, the sliding rocks continue to fascinate and we finally know what to look for to see the movie.