Situated on the border separating California and Nevada, Death Valley National Park earned its name in 1933 and is home to one of the Earth’s weirdest yet astonishing natural phenomena: sailing stones varying in sizes. No one has really seen them in action, but the trails behind them and the constant changing of their position show that they do.
Last August of 2014, a team of extremely patient researchers, with the help of organizations including the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and NASA, declared they had solved one of Earth’s greatest mysteries.
The movement originates from extremely thin windowpane ice that oftentimes covers the dry lake bed, says Richard Norris and James Norris. As the ice starts to melt in the late morning sun, it could disintegrate under the breeze. Ice panels afloat could have shoved the stones, resulting in a movement and leaving tracks on the dry surface. PLOS ONE, a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal published the cousins’ research.
In 2011, they started the research of the “Sailing Stones”. It was the time they founded the Slithering Stones Research Initiative. They set up a weather station beside Racetrack Playa and included 15 of their own rocks to it. These rocks had GPS tracking devices embedded in them.
From then on, they observed. Their time-lapse photography setup was able to capture the rocks sliding across Racetrack Playa on both December 4 and December 20, 2013. They were moving around 15 feet per minute. They became first people to see the rocks in action.
