Moving Rocks of Death Valley Finally Get a Solution

For the last 100 years, a weird phenomenon has been observed at Death Valley. The phenomenon is that rocks and boulders have been moving and rolling around the floor of the desert. Some gigantic boulders weigh as much as 600 pounds, and they leave a long trail behind them in places they have rolled across. Since 1948, scientists have tried to find an answer to why this happens, and at last an answer seems to have presented itself.

The options doing the rounds till now were UFOs, winds which had the strength of hurricanes, flooding, dust devils and other ‘out there’ explanations. However,when the researchers saw the rock phenomenon themselves, the mystery finally became clear. The people who made it possible were James Norris and Richard Norris. The two are cousins, and while the former is an engineer, the latter is a scientist.

What they did was to put a GPS tracker on some of the stones. The stones were then surrounded by cameras. The results that came out showed a weird and surprising result. The movement in the stones was due to ice! And that also in a place which is considered to be one of the driest and hottest in the world!

They found that with the right conditions, when there has been rainfall in the lake bed named “Racetrack Playa,” and sunshine just after that, thin plates of ice formed and that ice helped to push those rocks on the desert floor,the speed of which sometimes goes up to several feet per minute. When the duo had gone to inspect their instrument once, and “we were sitting on a mountainside and admiring the view when a light wind kicked up and the ice started cracking,” and “suddenly, the whole process unfolded before our eyes,”