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Mathematicians may have unlocked the secret of how “stone forests” form - Ars Technica

Mathematicians may have unlocked the secret of how “stone forests” form - Ars Technica

Sep 16, 2020 1 min, 35 secs

A team of applied mathematicians from New York University has turned its attention to the so-called "stone forests" common in certain regions of China and Madagascar.

These pointed rock formations, like the famed Stone Forest in China's Yunnan Province, are the result of solids dissolving into liquids in the presence of gravity, which produces natural convective flows, according to the NYU team.

"We first discovered the spikes formed by dissolution when we left candy in a water tank and came back later to find a needle-like spire," he said.

This drew us into the problem, and we were very excited when we realized the connection to stone pinnacles and stone forests, which have been quite mysterious in their development.

In order to test their simulations in the lab, the team combined granulated table sugar, corn syrup, and water in molds to make blocks and single pillars of solidified (hard-crack) candy—an approximation to the soluble rocks that typically form karst topographies.

The block starts out with internal pores and is entirely immersed under water, where it dissolves and becomes a "candy forest" before collapsing.

suggest that a similar mechanism is at work in the formation of stone forests, just on a much longer time scale.

When the water recedes, the pillars and stone forests emerge.

On the surface, these stone forests look rather similar to "penitentes": snowy pillars of ice that form in very dry air found high in the Andean glaciers. Some physicists have suggested that penitentes form when sunlight evaporates the snow directly into vapor, without passing through a water phase (sublimation).

But penitentes and stone forests are actually quite different in terms of the mechanisms involved in their formation.

In the future, they hope to further test this formation process under different environmental conditions in the lab, such as how precipitation and surface runoff, or being buried under loose sediment, might affect pinnacle formation.

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