Eerie ‘Sailing Stones’ Myth-Busted As Urban Legends Reveal a More Olympic Truth

In the dry lake beds of California and Nevada's Death Valley National Park, more than a few reported anomalies have sparked urban legends and paranormal stories alike. But after years of pain-staking observation, it was a biologist, an engineer and oddly enough a planetary scientist who solved a mystery that has baffled man for ages.

The group, who set up camp for nearly two years in an abandoned weather station, sought out to find the true cause behind Death Valley's famous "sailing stones". Weighing as much as 700 pounds, the boulders made of black dolomite have been known to crawl cross the Racetrack Playa, leaving graceful trails in their wake. But as inorganic materials, without a mechanism to move, let alone crawl, the mystery of the eerie sailing stones has baffled scientists for decades.

Posited theories run the gamut from symbiotic single-celled organisms that help them crawl, to the Earth's magnetic field and some even say extraterrestrial intervention. But deciding to find the hard answer for themselves of how the seemingly normal rocks traverse the flat barren lands of Death Valley, the three attached GPS units to 15 rocks in Racetrack Playa, and tracked what happen.

When the program began, physicist Ralph Lorenz, Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University jokingly called it "the most boring experiment ever." But given a fortunate series of events, the team was able to catch the phenomenon happening first-hand, which they reported in today's (Aug. 27) newest issue of the journal PLOS One.

"Science sometimes has an element of luck" co-author and paleobiologist from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Richard Norris said. "We expected to wait five or ten years without anything moving, but only two years into the project, we just happened to be there at the right time to see it happen in person. It's really a wonderful Goldilocks phenomenon."

After viewing that the Racetrack Playa had flooded just deep enough for the bases of the rocks to be completely covered, the researchers realized that freezing night temperatures that occasionally drop below zero could cause the water to freeze, causing a thin "windowpane" of ice beneath the rocks. Then, with a simple gust of a wind, the ice-ringed rocks crawl off like an Olympic event of curling.

"I have to confess, I was surprised" Lorenz says. "I really expected buoyancy to be required, and it clearly wasn't. The ice was thinner than I thought would be needed."

"It was amazing to see the process actually happen."

Though the trio was able to confirm the event by an unlikely set of circumstances, they expect that ecological changes attributed to climate change since the 1970s has also made these crawling events far more rare than were before. And as the required cold nights become few and farther between, as global warming and carbon emissions warm our inner atmosphere, the researchers predict the days of rock sailing may be soon behind us.