Mike K wrote: Slabshaft wrote:
I\'d rather see someone stick a rock somewhere than to remove them. Last year we found plenty of tracks with WAY too many missing rocks.
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It is wrong to presume that all racetrack trails that end with no rocks are necessarily due to someone taking the rock away. I\'m not saying it doesn\'t happen, but do not assume that a no rock trail is always due to vandalism. The most plausible theory of the rocks being partially lifted via ice collars explains how rocks large and small can move in unison, they are tied together by ice. It also explains how rocks many hundreds of pounds can move at all. Finally the rising water in a subsequent episode can lift the ice collar (or ice sheet) enough for the encased rock to move without touching the playa surface at all, hence a trail with no rock.
The NASA study referenced in this thread https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1005570/0?keyword=how
Also great shot!
Mike K
The fact that many of us who have gone out there for many year have seen with our own eyes that many rocks have moved or removed is evidence of what has happened and what continues to happen. I do understand the theory of ice and wind caused rock movement very well, and in order to imagine that this caused the recent removal of rocks that we saw there before you would have to push the limits of plausibility far beyond the breaking point.
I\'ve been mostly silent about this, but this intriguing photographic construction provides its own sad evidence of the things done to the Racetrack by visitors, including its photographic evidence of two rocks that have now been stacked atop one another.
This place, and these rocks, presented us with an astonishing and thought provoking geological miracle and even a mystery or two. The evidence that they no longer are where natural forces moved them, or that some of them have simply been remove to, I presume, decorate someone\'s mantle or backyard, tells a very different and not very miraculous story.
Dan
Jun 16, 2014 at 11:23 AM
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