Death Valley’s Moving Rocks Were Finally Caught in the Act

Death Valley’s Moving Rocks Were Finally Caught in the Act Nobody managed to film a rock moving on this lakebed for sixty six years, including a man who landed a plane on it and blasted a boulder with the propeller. In this one I go through the sailing stones of Racetrack Playa, the geologist who sat out a 1952 storm in his tent and came out to find fresh trails he had missed by one night, and the seven hundred pound rock named Karen that sat still for years and then simply vanished. The part that gets me is the answer, because it was never hurricane winds, it was ice about as thick as a pane of window glass breaking into huge floating panels and bulldozing the rocks through the mud at a few inches a second. I will be honest, my favourite detail is that it started in a kitchen, with a planetary scientist freezing a rock into a tub of water and blowing on it over a tray of sand. Some of those empty trails the rangers blamed on souvenir thieves were made by sheets of ice that melted away.