Sci: Mud and mud cracks

 

Saharan mud sticks to boots.

Mud is an ongoing frustration for me. Hell hath no fury quite like that of an author whose fond belief has gone unsubstantiated, though the fury of Australian tourists, caught in sticky mud near the Sahara (above) must be a close second. The tourist nearest to the camera is also a scientist, so she found it interesting.

Still, we Australians know about dry mud. No TV news broadcast about drought would be complete without images of cracked and dried mud from the bottom of a farm dam, drained by drought. My writing is largely powered by temporary obsessions, and one of my themes relates to the way things break up, from cracking paint to basalt flows that form columnar jointing—and drying mud.

New Zealand mud, Waiheke Island.

This is cracked mud from Waiheke Island in New Zealand, but I could have chosen from a range of shots taken in places as far away as the Sahara. As you can see if you look, the cracks are all the same…

It occurred to me to suggest that readers grow their own cracked mud, but it seems the process is far from easy. Full of enthusiasm, I collected dried mud chips from cracked mud on waste ground, clearly the right material to use, but that was where the frustration began.

Mud chips, collected from a dried puddle, reconstituted mud.

After four or five days, there were visible cracks there, as you can see below, but the pattern was wrong. I decided to try again. I broke up the dried mud and reduced it to powder, but seeing that my trusty white dish was originally manufactured as a baking dish, I decided to save time, and put the dish in the oven.

The results of my cracked-mud growing were poor.

I kept the temperature down to just under 100ºC, so the mud wouldn’t boil and bubble, but while there were visible cracks, the result was still disappointing. If I knew more about how cracking is caused, I might have had better luck, but science is like that, and the devil is in the details. Perhaps the area was too small, probably the mud needed to be deeper. Over to you, but just in case you are wondering, mud cracks have nothing to do with crystals.

The oven-dried mud pie was just as bad.

Mud and mud cracks: a hint

I left my mud dish out, where it was rained on and dried out, and a month later, it was developing cracks. Slowly. Can you do better?

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