Sailing Stones

A famous unsolved mystery has just been solved.  Who or what was moving rocks across Death Valley? Was it ghosts? Aliens? Bigfoot in an especially absurdist mood? Nah, it was ice and wind. Science bursts another “paranormal” bubble. The “Sailing Stones” of Death Valley’s Racetrack Playa have been a puzzle for decades. The rocks  leave trails behind them in the dirt that makes it clear they are being dragged or moving on their own, even though some weigh hundreds of pounds. Both scientific and supernatural explanations have been suggested, but it looks like a team Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego led by paleobiologist Richard Norris are the first to directly observe the movement in action and figure out why it happens. The team set up a weather station at the site and equipped 15 rocks with motion-activated GPS units in 2011. And then they waited. For two years. In December of 2013, Norris and his cousin, co-author of the study Jim Norris, inspected the site to find that the playa had a three inch layer