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| Nature's Ice Designs | |
 Scooped out circles |
 Polygon Islands |
| Mark Kessler of the Earth Sciences
Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz thinks these patterns
aren't man-made as some have thought, but are made by what's called "forest
heave" - ice freezing and thawing, sorting and squeezing the different
sizes of rocks and soil. Using a computer program he thinks he's successfully
duplicated the effect.
Kessler said, "One of the real mysteries to me was how you can get labyrinths or islands of stones in one location and polygons in another, when the ratio of stones to soil is the same in both places. Our model indicates that you get polygons when the squeezing is strong enough to counteract the effects of lateral sorting." |
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