Some of the most breathtaking zen garden patterns on the planet owe their existence to an unlikely artist: thousands of tiny "ice needles."
Credit: Quan-Xing Liu of East China Normal University
Credit: Quan-Xing Liu of East China Normal University
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TechTranscript
00:00In high-latitude permafrost environments and high-altitude mountains, there are a large
00:12number of mysterious regular surface patterning, also known as patterning, such as the Qinghai
00:19Tibet Plateau and other freezing regions in China.
00:24The Svalbard Islands in Norway in the Arctic, and the Alpine regions in Ethiopia.
00:32The patterned ground is made up of different kinds of stones and soils.
00:36Some arranged in polygonal net, stone circles, and others in strapped spatial patterns.
00:45The origin of these regular patterns has long been puzzling scientists, but recently this
00:51enigma is starting to be solved.
00:57Scientists now attribute the spontaneous regular patterns to a process called spatial self-organization.
01:05In the periglacial environment, when scouring together with soil freezing thorn cycles are
01:11speculated to drive the aggregation and separation movements of granular particles in the soil,
01:19which eventually result in assorted spatial patterns of stones on the land surfaces.
01:32This idea has been sparked by theoretical and empirical studies in physics, chemistry, biology,
01:40and ecology.
01:41However, it is notoriously difficult to test this idea in the field.
01:46The geomorphological systems in cold regions often evolve at extremely slow rates, largely
01:54forbidden human observers to record the processes.
01:59Many existing numerical models have suggested that differential frost heave and radial expansion
02:05of the fine-grained soils can lead to the movement of surface particles to the margins of the plugs, and the formation of the self-organized patterns.
02:15This mechanism can reproduce a variety of large-scale sorted patterns, such as polygons and sorted circles, but direct experimental evidence for this model is still lacking.
02:29Scientists have long speculated that needle eyes formed in the permafores layer could play a role.
02:35A new research led by an international team from China, Japan, the US, and the Netherlands revisited this old idea with brand new evidence and theory.
02:48The researchers designed an elegant experiment system that allows for the formation of needle eyes in well-controlled lab conditions.
02:57This system can mimic a time machine with which the observers can push the fast-forward button to speed up the process of land surface evolution within a microcosm.
03:09Within a couple of weeks, the researchers can now observe the years or even decades-long process happening in nature.
03:17They use video camera and computer program to automatically track the movement trajectory of every single stone and reproduce such observed processes in computer with mathematical models.
03:31The researchers found that driven by the freezing thong cycles in soils, the surface granular particles migrated towards the stone-rich areas from stone-poor areas.
03:41This is exactly the process where a variety of order spatial patterns of stones arises from.
03:50This group of scientists have replicated the experiment numerous times with all kinds of settings of needle eyes properties and stone field concentration.
04:00They put together these nonlinear relationships between different needle eyes height and stone field concentration
04:06to demonstrate that the geomorphological pattern formation process has the same physical principle,
04:12as that underpins the water-oil separation process.
04:15The essence of the phase separation process is that the stone from the ground to the ground to the ground to the ground.
04:21This method is different from the ground to the ground.
04:26Known as phase separation mechanism, the phase separation theory perfectly reproduced the different types of sorted patterns,
04:33and found that the activity of needle eyes plays a dominant role in shaping this pattern ground.
04:40What makes the scientists more exciting is that their phase separation model can also perfectly reproduce the similar sorted patterns found in the Martian boulders by curiosity.
04:52Can this seem as another evidence reinforcing the existence of soil water on Mars?
04:59Does this mean freezing thong cycles also drive the evolution of Martian landscapes?
05:05It's still too early to answer this question.
05:08But this study does open many opportunities to look into geological and geomorphic evolution of Earth-like planets.
05:22– Now let's say for the snowfall two towers…