Mystery of the sailing stones of Death Valley solved – 'climate change' immediately blamed for no good reason

Hmm. Nasty ol’ global warming again. Odd thing is, it can rain heavily in the Death Valley area. The Racetrack is not in Death Valley, per se. It is to the north and is over 3500′ up. From personal experience over decades (1968 to 2013 off and on), it can get very chilly in the hills around those parts.

The researchers also observed rock-less trails formed by grounding ice panels – features that the Park Service had previously suspected were the result of tourists stealing rocks.
So is the NPS going to appologize to everyone it’s accused of collecting the rocks?

Actually there is a “good reason.” Blaming AGW helps get the next grant. I kid you not. Everyone wants to cash in on the big ATM that is the government (taxpayer) funding machine.

Yup, ice and rain in Death Valley, definitely Global Warming.

They were doing so good, solving a decade’s old science mystery … and then they had to go and invoke that old-time AGW religion.

They should park Cook, Appell and Nuccitelli out there and track their movement.
Something tells me the rock would out pace them.

The title is a bit disingenuous. The title suggests that climate change is involved in the phenomenon of the moving rocks where as the quote you highlighted is talking about the frequency of such events decreasing possibly due to climate change. A better headline would have been something like “Sailing stone mystery solved however scientists say for no good reason that climate change could stop the rocks in their tracks”.
In order to avoid people misinterpreting your motives, headlines that accurately reflect the content of the post would be a good policy.

[snip – off topic -mod]

They weren’t allowed to use native rocks, so they had to import their own that were obviously polluted by climate change.

The mysterious sliding rocks of Death Valley have been known for 65 years. Here is what I wrote about them in “Surface Processes and Landforms,” 1999 (p.476-478) with photos and tracks of sliding stones.
“The Mysterious Sliding Rocks of Death Valley National Monument”
“For many years, geomorphologists have been intrigued by the mystery of the sliding boulders of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley National Monument (Figure 17—5). The mud- cracked surface of the playa is criss-crossed by shallow troughs trailing behind rocks (Figure 17—6) ranging from pebbles to boulders weighing more than 700 pounds. The playa surface is nearly flat, so the rocks are clearly not sliding downhill. At first, speculation of the cause of the sliding rocks centered around the possibility that the rocks had been pushed across the surface by humans, but the remoteness of the area argued against such an explanation. Few people brave the unpaved, 30-mile road that leads to Race- track playa. Tracks of sliding rocks have been reported on at least eight other playas in California and Nevada and in the Middle East. The sliding-rock trails vary both in length and direction. Some trails make straight, roughly parallel lines for several hundred meters (Figures 17—6A and 17—7B). Others curve gradually, criss-cross one another (Figure 17—6B) or change direction abruptly (Figures 17—6C and 17—7B). After traveling hundreds of meters along straight or gently curving paths, many trails end with a scribbled path (Figure 17—7B). The greatest concentration of sliding rocks occurs in the south- eastern portion of Racetrack playa where 28 sliding boulders have been counted in a one-half square mile (1.3 km2) area (Messina, 1997).
The first scientific papers describing the sliding rocks appeared in 1948 (McAllister and Agnew, 1948), followed by several in the following decades (Shelton, 1953; Stanley, 1 Schumm, 1956, Sharp, 1960; Sharp and Carey, 1976). All suggested that high winds, preceded by wetting of the playa had pushed the rocks across the slippery surface. However, despite four decades of investigation of the sliding rock scientists and park rangers, no one has ever seen one move.
Ice is known to occasionally form as thick as 10 centimeters on Racetrack playa, and some researchers have suggested that as wind pushes ice rafts, rocks in the ice are drag across the playa surface, leaving parallel trails. Stanley (1955) first suggested that ice floating in a shallow lake on the playa might be involved in moving the stones, based largely on parallel paths taken by the rocks. However, Sharp and C (1976) placed two small rocks within a circle of steel rods later found that one of them had escaped. They noted moving ice could not have accomplished this and, along their observation that tracks did not maintain constant separation, concluded that ice was not necessary to move the rocks. The ice-rafting hypothesis was recently revived by Reid et al. (1995) on the basis of mapping of similar, parallel paths of rocks sliding on the Racetrack Playa. They suggest rocks of different mass should not be propelled equally high winds without ice and that the wetted playa surface not as slippery as once thought. They explained the observed lack of parallel paths between some tracks as having been caused by breaking up of the ice into smaller individual blocks and concluded that ice was necessary for playa rocks to slide.
FIGURE 17—6 (A.) Two sliding rocks leaving trails on Racetrack pla Death Valley National Monument, California. (Photo Messina) (B.) Trails of sliding rocks crossing one another, Racetrack playa, Death Valley National Monument, California. by P. Messina) (C.) Abrupt change in direction of sliding rock trail, Racetrack playa, Death Valley National Monument, California. (Photo by P. Messina)
In a discussion of the conclusions of Reid et al., Sharp (1996) presented evidence that at least some of the rocks must have slid without the presence of ice. Messina (1997) monitored many sliding rocks on Racetrack playa with GPS (ground positioning system) and found that, although many of the trails were ap- proximately parallel (Figure 17—7), in detail they converged and diverged and in some cases appeared to be random, a situation inconsistent with movement of stones frozen in a sheet of ice.”
What is new about this study is the first observation of stones moving under known conditions. As such, it is an important contribution.

Since the climate always changes and climate change is the natural state of affairs, why not? But when you have to account for the fact this phenomenon was first documented in 1915, it’s kinda hard to tie it all together.
This is only an issue if facts are a concern.

I can only say that now we will miss all the good stories that the scientist invented instead of observing.

I read a Reuters article about this on Yahoo News. No mention of “Climate Change”.
Somebody is spinning it.

Was this previously settled science?

Q. Without 24/7/365 monitoring by specialised stop-motion cameras, how can anyone assign cause to this event?
A. Those who wish to benefit from assigning a cause.

What the heck are Watts and the rest of you talking about? READ the comment again:
“The last suspected movement was in 2006, and so rocks may move only about one millionth of the time,” said Lorenz. “There is also evidence that the frequency of rock movement, which seems to require cold nights to form ice, may have declined since the 1970s due to climate change.”
A perfectly reasonable statement, unless you deny his implicit assumption that nights in the desert have warmed since 1970 -as have most nights around the world.
You guys spent all this time and energy ridiculing this one statement? If this is any indication of the gravitas with which you approach the science of AGW, the Scientific Community has little reason to pay attention to you.

It is the moral duty of qualified PhD Scientists to publish and to sort out the truth, not amateurs. You’d like to think you are an arbiter, but your convictions matter only to you and your fellow deniers, not to to the world of science, and certainly not to me.