99 Years Later... We Solved It

look at this, okay, here's a path and the path goes pop pop pop pop pop over here and then turns at a right angle. There are rocks in the Death Valley desert that move across the ground on their own leaving strangely long footprints and for a century, no one could figure out why, so look at the size of that puppy and it turns out it's not a problem at all. move each stone. We're talking a lot of bulldozers with the force of force here, so what force has been making rocks move for over a century? One Hundred Years When Humans Don't Look The first recorded account of the trails was in 1915, when a prospector named Joseph Crook, who was supposed to be searching for precious metals, found the rock trails.

Crook reportedly showed the rocks to his wife, who couldn't believe that larger rocks would move naturally, so she skeptically marked the position of a large rock and, of course, eventually moved away from the mark. . The lake bed became known as the racecourse beach and the stones, the sailing stones. You go to the desert. and you see the footprints that these giant rocks have left behind, some that are parallel where the rocks have moved at the same time and then rotated at the same time and you wonder what's going on so I started investigating it and what I found was a touching story about two cousins ​​who

solved

the mystery together and a clever experiment that had convinced scientists that the right solution was wrong and then this moment where scientists from all over the world came up and said, "Oh, I have this another mystery with rocks". touching and a young scientist whose life was changed by this mystery, so back in 2014, cousins ​​Dr.

Richard Norris and James Norris

solved

the rock mystery at Racetrack Playa and now they are back, so I spent 16 hours traveling to meet them and join them. on your last adventure check your spare tire sharp rocks ahead no triple ah my butt is vibrating hey dad hey diana hey it's diana you're watching physics girl I think it's also worth taking a minute to appreciate how incredible the environment is these rocks The Death Valley is in the northern Mojave Desert, sitting in the rain shadow of the Sierras. Death Valley is one of the driest places on the planet and is hands down the hottest, so naturally we went there in the winter.

When we went we camped for a night in stove pits which is a good middle ground because it has a gas station and a general store that once served 12 cups of coffee in an hour and then took a four wheel drive jeep and then We walk the 24 miles down a bumpy dirt road and you sit there clenching your fists and hoping a tire doesn't blow out until you see the beach. I couldn't even wait for Levi to come film me because I ran to the race track alone, everything is so smooth and then boom, a track that's so cool, this is the lowest point here and uh, and if you go up to the grandstand, which is the pile of rocks at the other end, okay, that's what the grandstand called the grandstand, the lake bed of the race track. full of dry sediment that extends 1000 feet down into the ground, so one of my first thoughts was if the tracks were made by an animal, but then you see this place, we are like what lives in death valley, It's called death valley.

It won't be very good, we had a beautiful kangaroo rat at our camp last night, oh, cute and they're the cutest little thing, they're cute, but they don't push rocks like that, no matter how much Richard had heard about the problem with coolers. racetrack.

years

before at school and finally the mystery itch got to him enough, so what fundamentally happened is that Jim said I think we could probably solve this little problem, so they started going to the race track and trying experiments that Jim had the idea of. When putting GPSs on rocks, we put our own rocks, of course, we drill holes in the rocks to place a GPS tracker.

The switch would be activated and the GPS would turn on in live mode. It's okay, we collect data constantly. Well, you would know that the rocks had moved, but how would you know what had happened and then connecting that to the weather station meant that we would know what the weather conditions were? So the duo set up their trackers in the winter of 2011 and their collaborator Ralph Lorenz reportedly claimed this would be the most boring experiment ever performed as they prepared to wait for something to happen knowing it could take decades, but just two. Years

later

, motion activated GPS trackers activated on the day they least expected movement before we found out why GPS trackers activated. a quick message i would like to thank the sponsor of today's video best help is there something that interferes with your happiness or prevents you from achieving your goals?

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I have to confess convincingly, the reason Richard confesses is because the experiment he was referring to was so beautifully convincing that it was not ice. That's how that experiment went. The scientists put stakes in the ground surrounding a couple of rocks and then one day a rock moved. and the other one stayed there, the researchers were convinced that if the ice sheets were carrying the rocks, then both rocks would have moved, so at this point, James and Richard practically rule out the ice, they are the team's wind, so they head to the beach expecting a hurricane to blow the rocks away and our expectation was that we would come out here with a four season tent, stake it when it was howling outside, lean out, you know, and see the rocks slide something like that, but in a Cold morning with a light breeze, a few days after a snowstorm brought enough water to form a three-inch pond on the beach, something happened.

I have something embarrassing to say, you know, we watched it for like an hour. After it happened, it's fine, but unfortunately we were there about a kilometer away and we saw all the ice that had been part of this big ice panel piling up from the other side and it was like, hmmm, Jim, what's going on and then We walk. along the coast over there and there were big piles of this clinker ice that sounds like clinking clinking clinking clinking all along the coast that's, you know, fine, clear glass, beautiful glass with rocks in it, giant sheets of ice. hundreds of feet wide We were starting to move across the beach and then we got here, we went up what we call fountain hill because that's where almost all the rocks come from and it was like, oh my gosh, we missed it, ya you know, the biggest movement. event in 10 years and we were in the wrong place, you know, a kilometer away, and then it was like the scales fell off your eyes, literally, you know that, so we immediately understood what was happening, what What they noticed was that on rare occasions when the beach fills with rainwater or snow and is deep enough to form floating ice during exceptionally cold nights the pond freezes to form thin sheets of ice the ice then begins to Melting in the sun of the day the ice breaks up and when the wind picks up it blows the sheets of ice cross the beach and drag the rocks with them and of course the rocks drag trails in the ground as they go.

The winds are not strong, I had to take my hat off, yes, that tension of the wind in an area of ​​a couple of square kilometers. Floating ice, of course, makes the ice move. Here's why all this is so surprising. We know how thick the ice was and the ice was about an eighth of an inch thick. Wow, it's not that good, which Richard and James soon realized. that the choral experiment had not disproved the ice theory it had disproved thick ice as yes, move a rock like that with ice that is thin enough to break those stakes no, that doesn't seem reasonable, the ice was thinner than you thought no one thought it was possible, yes this is a thin layer of ice, that's amazing.

They both start moving and then they move for 16 minutes in exactly the same pattern, but they're 650 feet apart, yeah, and you're going to be a single panel of ice, so the wind moves the ice and carries the rocks and the rocks make the footprints, but here's the thing: the pond is not big enough to fill the entire beach and yet some of the rocks travel all the way to the distant shore, how do we know that and do you know that? that they've traveled very far because they're this distinctive dolomite, okay, and the only source of dolomite is from there, which is right there, how do they get there?

When you get a pond, the pond is formed here. It is almost a flat surface through which the pond passes. there is a classic, so what the oceanographer calls a marine chavant event, a sish, is when strong winds can cause really rapid changes in the height of the water, in this case it moves the entire pond from one end of the beach to the another, essentially the pond. It rolls uphill and all the rocks just fall off, they go away and then at the end of the day the wind dies down and it moves back, so they published an article describing what was happening in 2014 and what happened next was incredible , my favorite.

Part of this whole story is that after you publish your paper, there are all these scientists from all over the world who send you emails and photos and say: wait, wait, I have something: we were here at one point and we met. This couple in the parking lot and the wife told us this story about seeing this video on TV of ice bursting in someone's garage on the great lakes and you can find these on youtube these photos of ice being blown through the great lakes, of course, a huge area, big, long, reaches to the right and forms mountains that are like, I don't know, at least a couple of meters high.

Everywhere he went, people began to tell him about mysterious things they had found on rocks and ice moved by unusual movements. forces and then we have observed in Google Earth images of the great slave lake, basically rocks the size of a house that have apparently made paths on the bottom of the lake, but there are also some other unanswered mysteries and then there is this place in Spain eh, that one. It is in the area of ​​Lamanche, Man of La Mancha, you know, and they have documented traces of rocks, those people say that it is not this mechanism and their argument is that they are salt lakes and, therefore, the salt reduces the temperature of Freezing enough water so that ice does not form on the surface to make the rocks move.

I don't think that story is, you know, a future adventure in Spain, so I think I finally understand why it took so long to resolve this. mystery, we could say the rocks move for about 15 minutes and then they stopped, they're done, you have to be here at the right time, perfect and exact goldilocks, it's goldilocks with cocaine, yes, that's a children's story completely different from ours. I don't usually say it's the hottest place in the world, but you need it to be really cold at night or not rain as often. I imagine that's the key. It's incredibly windy, but you only need light winds and you need a source of rocks in this spot. beach that is mostly a thousand feet deep and pure sediment, everything about this issue is just perfect, which is one of the things I love about this story, but what I like most is the next part about a girl from Germany, so one of the people who contactedwith us after our article was published was a 13 year old girl from southern Germany, her name is Ronya Spanky and she had been doing experiments to simulate what was happening here in Death Valley for her science fair project. and it turns out not. sweat, it's okay to move every rock here, we're talking about many, many bulldozers, worthwhile strength, the notion that it had to be really super slippery, you know, to make the rocks move, this is bold, it's well, and Ronya proved it in her little you know experiment after school and it turns out that she won a whole series of science fair projects there are not so many scientific things that we are going to see that there are a lot of people here who come to visit us and check, so this is quite spectacular and you can go see the stones if you want, it's not easy.

I know Richard and James were very eager to solve the mystery, but I don't think they expected the impact they were going to have on other people's lives and I can't wait. For the answers you discover below, thank you very much for watching and happy physics.