(Please post your answers and your name in the comments, and we’ll give the answer next week….)
Here at What on Earth, we’re constantly stumbling across interesting photos, videos, and audio clips from NASA’s exploration of our planet (be it from space, the field, or the lab.). We’ve started posting snippets of them every now and then, usually on Fridays. What we post will change, but the question to you all will always be the same: “What on Earth is that?”
We’ll give you a week to mull it over and guess (use the comments), and we’ll post the answer the following Friday. Our only hints:
1) Our picks will always be related to Earth science in one way or another, and…
2) They’ll have some relation to what we do here at NASA.
Looks like dried mud to me…
That is a bunch of atoms arranged in a particular way.
Looks like the track of a moving rock found in some dry lake bed. The trak is made by rocks that move when the lake bed is muddy after a rain and a strong wind blows the rocks accross the ground.
Looks like a dry lake bed with car or wagon wheel marks scratched in the hardened surface.
This sure looks like a track made by one of the so called “sailing stones” of Death Valley:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones
It’s the trail of a rock that moved across the desert in times of precipitation.
It’s a track of moving/sailing stone in the dry desert. Two famous place for this are in Racetrack Playa and Death Valley.
It is the result of a rock that had been submerged in a temporary lake in a desert valley the surface of which froze (presumably over night) thus entrapping the rock. Due to a uniquely slippery quality of the mud in this particular valley coupled with particularly strong winds acting on the ice sheet, the rock was dragged some distance across the desert floor generating this “trail.” As the sun came up the valley warmed, melting the ice and eventually evaporating the water leaving little evidence, but for the above pictured phenomenon, that any of these amazing events had taken place. Cheers!
Racetrack Playa
Looks like Death Valley Racetrack Playa.
It’s been said already, but it’s definitely a rock-trail left on a dry lake-bed (playa). Most likely from your recent voyage to one ; )
Looks like the dry beds of the Great Salt Lake.
It looks like the dried beds of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Just saying…..
I would say mud cracks caused by extensive drought revealing bed of lake/pond. The tracks are possibly ATV trails or aforementioned rock “sailors” :).
PS: NASA + Mud Cracks = Mars o.O
These are rover test tracks through a dry lake bed here on Earth.
Of couse the object is very heavy and hard,because its can make the trak effct on th dry land,and its move in a high speed