The Sailing Stones
Rocks move across a dry lake bed, leaving trails behind them, in a phenomenon that baffled scientists for decades.
The Sailing Stones
In Death Valley’s Racetrack Playa, rocks weighing hundreds of pounds move across the dry lake bed, leaving long trails. For decades, no one witnessed them actually moving.
Stones ranging from pebbles to boulders weighing over 700 pounds were found with trails stretching hundreds of feet. Various explanations were proposed, including wind, ice, and alien activity.
In 2014, researchers solved the mystery: the rocks move when rain floods the playa, ice forms, and wind pushes the ice-embedded rocks. The phenomenon requires such specific conditions that it had never been observed until GPS trackers and time-lapse photography documented it.