Death Valley Racetrack Mystery Revealed!

[Eric Leppanen]

Now we know!

http://www.grindtv.com/outdoor/nature/post/racetrack-playa-mystery-death-valley-solved/

[vinny]

Pretty cool. I always thought that the wind theory was bullshit.

[Jmarmck]

Very cool. :cool:

[BrianShaw]

Fascinating, but I'll never look at that again with quite the same eyes. Reading "the secret" was almost like seeing a bad magician who can't hide his methods.

[Jmarmck]

or there is not Santa Claus.

[seabee1999]

I just saw the news today. I am both fascinated and excited about it!

R/
Dave

[Jim Cole]

Very, very cool!

[Drew Wiley]

I heard that explanation half a century ago, back when I was studying solifluction and periglacial geomorphology. Tiny bits of ice can do amazing things, and I can
think of several other "unexplainable" examples that can easily be explained that way. And some of that clay down in that part of the world is as slippery as soap
under certain conditions.

[Kirk Gittings]

Crap. Does this mean that Roswell was a weather balloon too? :)

[BrianShaw]

Crap. Does this mean that Roswell was a weather balloon too? :)

No, that was real. How do you think I got here?

[BrianShaw]

No, that was real. How do you think I got here?

Ya... I keep thinking about that day. There I was, sitting in the galaxy's hippest cybercafe getting an energy-boosting infusion, having the time of my life chatting with another alien about how my digital Nikon imagator is better than his extremely rare but archaic imported film-based Canon imagator. All of the sudden a big brute threw me to the ground using all three of his arms, covered my two heads with a bag, and "gave me a ride to the edge of the solar system". Little did I know that it was a one-way ride and despite their periodic visits from them to make sure that I'm OK, they have no intentions of taking me back home.

[BrianShaw]

Ya... I keep thinking about that day. There I was, sitting in the galaxy's hippest cybercafe getting an energy-boosting infusion, having the time of my life chatting with another alien about how my digital Nikon imagator is better than his extremely rare but archaic imported film-based Canon imagator. All of the sudden a big brute threw me to the ground using all three of his arms, covered my two heads with a bag, and "gave me a ride to the edge of the solar system". Little did I know that it was a one-way ride and despite their periodic visits from them to make sure that I'm OK, they have no intentions of taking me back home.

... and all there was left for me was wondering how those rocks move. Now my life is over. OVER.

[Erik Larsen]

... and all there was left for me was wondering how those rocks move. Now my life is over. OVER.

+1
Some things are best left a mystery. I'm gonna assume the video was a fake!

[Bruce Watson]

Now we know!

http://www.grindtv.com/outdoor/nature/post/racetrack-playa-mystery-death-valley-solved/

Excellent! A little modern technology, but mostly just good ol' human curiosity. We humans can be pretty cool at times. Nicely done answer to a long standing question.

[Drew Wiley]

Obviously, if they had cross-sectioned the rocks to begin with and had spotted the baked teflon layer on the bottom, they would have realized that only aliens had
the technology way back then to make rocks like that. It's all a cryptographic code that moves about from time to time. Once you decipher it, you'll understand
what Minor White really meant by the Zone System. He was connected to them all along.

[BrianShaw]

Teflon??? We use a proprietary leviatation method. Mere mortal humans cannot detect this. The teflon is a ruse. But you must not be a mere mortal human since you, like Minor White, know about the CryptoCode. Shhh... or they will banish you to an even more remote place than this blue planet... someplace many many zones away.

[Michael Mutmansky]

Pretty cool. I always thought that the wind theory was bullshit.

Except that wind is fundamental to the mechanism of movement presented in the solution?

[Drew Wiley]

From the tracks it would appear so. But in those relatively dry conditions needle ice can also form and behave differently. Too involved a subject to go into the details here. It's far easier just to blame aliens.

[Dan Fromm]

No, that was real. How do you think I got here?

Interesting. I thought you'd crawled out from under a cabbage leaf.

[Drew Wiley]

Basic theory: you watch one of those stupid TV reality shows and they tell you how you can get water in a desert by heating a rock up and letting moisture condense on it during the nite. Hope I never have to test that idea, while dying of thirst next to the TV cameraman holding the sixpack. The black volcanic rock on
the Racetrack sitting on bright reflective clay obviously absorbs a lot of heat during the day. Water vapor condenses on the underside and forms needle ice (frost on steroids) on the underside. This slightly "levitates" the rock (for those of you insisting on UFO influences), but probably turns to water ice under recompression, if enough water vapor is there to begin with. Something also has to happen to the clay involving the presence of water, but I suppose it's best to read the current scientific paper on that. Significant cold inversions do happen. The same geography that makes much of that area a heat sink can also make it a cold sink. I've even seen Salt Creek frozen. The last time I was trying to figure out the Racetrack I spent most of the day trying get to a friend unstuck climbing up exactly the wrong section of Ubehebe Crater. 4-wheelers had ruined almost all the potential shots of the rock tracks. Wish they had been beamed up.

[Drew Wiley]

Part 2: then look up the study to see if this part matches. If that playa contains bentonite or a similar hydroscopic clay (probable), what the happens is that if enough moisture is present there (it doesn't have to be a soaking rain), the clay swells shut and essentially waterproofs itself. That means a very thin film will remain on the surface and not soak in. Being thin, it will also easily freeze, but in a different manner than under the rocks. The clay particles themselves are virtually interlocked, just like a tortoise shell. I learned all this selling clay-based waterproofings. So that ice will produce an ephemeral ice-skating rink, which will sublimate and disappear the next dawn. Soaking rains will, on the other hand, soak the playa and become apparent as crack patterns. Not common on the Racetrack; but it can happen once in awhile. So are there any new tweaks to this fifty year old explanation, or just a confirmation of it? A few nails out there might help with the ATV vandalism.

[Struan Gray]

Plos One is a respectable journal. That doesn't mean it's holy writ, but the obvious objections will have been covered.

This study doesn't rule out ice heave as another mechanism, but it seems unlikely to me. The parallel tracks with matching kinks and changes of direction fit perfectly with the idea of several boulders held by the same large ice sheet and being carried along with it. They would be hard to reproduce with an ice mechanism, especially with different size boulders - most freeze-thaw flow patterns also involve size sorting.

The journal article is pay to read (unless you have an institutional subscription), but the figures and captions are available for free. They make the argument pretty clear - and, to my mind, watertight.

[Drew Wiley]

Ice-heave via needle ice is the basic mechanism behind rock glacier, sorted rings and mounds, etc - that is something I've studied quite a bit, and it does not fit
the Racetrack phenomenon at all, other than the probability that needle ice very briefly forms under the rocks, as I already described. Why do I say that? - because of the basically dessicated conditions where that kind of thing is likely to transpire after the water condenses. But it would be a very temporary thing. Frost heaving
requires months, years, centuries to do its thing to any conspicuous degree. As much as I hate the proliferation of drones, it would be one way to systematically
map what those rocks are doing. But I still think the very most probably explanation is that aliens are playing either bocci ball or croquet out there.

[Struan Gray]

Has anyone considered the possibility that the whole playa is moving, and the rocks are standing still?

We have solifluction terraces on our local hills in N.W.Scotland which are probably remnants from the last glacial maximum (it hasn't been cold enough for long enough since). I always find it odd that a hundred year old wood will be designated a pristine nature reserve, but not ten thousand year old soil structures.

[BrianShaw]

Has anyone considered the possibility that the whole playa is moving, and the rocks are standing still?

Good thought. Maybe that's how it really works and the GPS sensors on the rocks were deceived.

[Drew Wiley]

Darn aliens sure have us tricked, don't they? Making the rocks stand still as the earth revolves!

[Kirk Gittings]

Good thought. Maybe that's how it really works and the GPS sensors on the rocks were deceived.

Well duh! :)

[Drew Wiley]

GPS has it shortcomings, especially when the person reading it is holding it upside down and thinks east is west. .. especially when he think an official trail sign with
an arrow pointing one direction is wrong, and his GPS is correct instead. I won't relate the whole story like I did over on APUG, but it happened two weeks ago. His
friends were waiting at the parking lot, two miles away one direction, and he insisted on going the other way, twelve miles away when he finally reached the wrong
trailhead, with no cell phone reception in that area. The brains behind inventing that device mean very little if the person reading it has no brains of his own!

[Bob Sawin]

Always held hope that it would turn out to be Bigfoot skipping stones...