Rockin' Rocks Wild & Weird

# Wormy fish-killers Convoys of caterpillars

-# Super-clever, brainless slime... #

-Ugh!

# Bunny-rabbit swarms, raging storms

# And pigs that swim at dinner time

# Tornadoes of fire Starfish going haywire

-# Algae balls from space! #

-What?!

# Prairie dogs that chat Birds going splat

# And fish slapping in your face

# They're wild and weird Wild and weird

# Really, really wild and really, really weird

# They're wild and weird Wild and weird

# They're really, really wild

# They're really, really wild and weird... #

Coming up on today's show, some stone-related strangeness.

The riddle of the roving rocks.

A pebble that will literally set your pants on fire.

And a cracking family holiday, with real cracks.

Who's a good boy, Rover?

Yes, you are, yes, you are.

SHE WOOFS

Are you a good boy, Rover?

Yes, you are, yes, you are. Good boy.

Here you go.

You promised you'd do your half of the washing-up.

Sorry, Tim, I can't at the moment, I am training my pet rock.

-Pet rock!

-Yes.

-You can't have a pet rock, they don't do anything!

Er, I'll have you know Rover here has mastered quite a few tricks.

-OK, show me.

-What, now?

Yeah. And if it can do a trick

then I'll do all of the washing-up for a whole week.

-What, one trick?

-Yeah.

-Er, OK.

-Come on, stop stalling.

-I'm not, just... Ready?

-Yeah.

Stay.

-What? No.

-Don't forget to scrub the pans that are in the oven, will you?

-It's not fair!

-Oh, before you go,

do you want to watch some rocks that actually can move?

Yeah, go on.

We're off to the US of A and the deserts of Eastern California.

This is the hottest place on Earth,

with temperatures that can exceed 50 Celsius.

Little wonder it's known as Death Valley.

Death Valley? That's not a real place,

that's a made-up name, like...Narnia,

or Cheddar Gorge.

HE SCOFFS

In such a hostile environment,

you wouldn't expect to see much sign of life,

but something very weird is going on in this remote and barren landscape.

Pretty awesome.

The local stones are apparently on the move.

Oh, this is so cool, look at that.

This giant expanse called the Racetrack Playa

is crisscrossed with tracks, seemingly left by lumps of rock.

But look at those tracks, I mean, so many of those tracks are just

following each other perfectly.

Boom, boom.

Exact pattern.

Awesome stuff.

Yet, spookily, no-one has ever seen the rocks move.

Mmm. I love a good mystery, me.

I'll have this figured out in no time.

Two other people trying to solve the mystery

are cousins Dick and Jim Norris.

They've had a lifelong fascination with these slithering stones.

Ha, all those amateurs aren't going to figure anything out,

they haven't even got camels with them.

Who goes to the desert without camels?

Camels don't live in America, Tim.

RECORD-SCRATCH EFFECT

Well, some of the rocks have clearly moved, oh,

probably a good 2km or so.

So it's very clear that something interesting is going on.

But what, exactly?

Dick and Jim soon discovered that plenty of crackpot suggestions

had already been put forward.

Well, I think it was everything from lizards pushing rocks around

to giant magnets, like the rocks were magnetic filings

or something like that.

-Space aliens...

-Of course.

What about you, Tim? Any ideas.

Er...well, no, not yet...

but I haven't heard anything good from Dick and Jim yet.

What makes them so qualified to solve this mystery?

One's a geologist, the other designs scientific instruments.

"Instruments"!

I still think they'd be better off with a camel.

With all the crazy theories proved wrong,

it was left to Dick and Jim to find the answer,

and they came up with an ingenious way of doing so.

So this is one of our GPS stones right here.

GPS package in the top of the stone,

and if the stone takes off on one of these moving adventures,

it triggers the GPS to start

recording its position once a second,

so we have a very, very good view of exactly when and exactly where

this stone goes as it takes off across the Playa.

Now all Dick and Jim had to do

was wait for one of their rocks to go walkies.

For months, nothing happened.

Then they got a signal that the stones were on the move.

Rushing to the desert, they discovered something unexpected.

A giant alien lizard with a magnet.

No. Ice.

Even in Death Valley, it does rain once or twice a year,

forming huge shallow ponds,

and at night the temperature can drop below freezing.

And when you mix water with sub-zero conditions, you get...?

An increase in winter-coat sales.

Er, yes. And...ice as well(?)

The surface of this pond was covered with skim ice.

It was just blowing very light breezes, and then right around noon,

there was suddenly popping and crackling

all over the pond surface in front of us.

The ice sheet that was covering the Playa started to

break up into smaller panels,

and then the panels started drifting slowly off to the north,

and we realised that they were driving these stones, very slowly,

across the Playa.

And I said to Jim, "This is it," you know.

And it was one of those just sort of "a-ha, eureka" moments.

So the riddle of the roving rocks was finally solved,

and the answer turned out to be

nothing more than a few sheets of ice.

Awesome stuff.

-Cool, eh?

-Have you seen this?

It says the entire show is about rocks, but that can't be right.

What's that?

This is the script for today's show.

-What show?

-Well, this show. Wild And Weird. The one that we're filming?

Who did you think this lot were?

Oh, I don't know. Hadn't really noticed them before.

But you can't make an entire TV show just about rocks, can you?

Well, what does the script say?

Er... Oh, it says Naomi says, "Yes, you can."

Yes, you can.

Now, everyone loves a trip to a sunny beach.

-What about vampires?

-Stick to the script.

-Sorry.

-But for Lynne Heiner and her family from California,

their summer beachcombing trip

was about to turn into a day they'd never forget,

for all the wrong reasons.

As we would find interesting things to look at, everyone would stop,

and we would kind of pick what was our favourite rock or shell.

Ooh, I love beachcombing. I've got my collection right here.

Look. Ooh! This one is a pebble.

That's another pebble.

This one's a pebble.

-Yeah.

-You'll never guess what this one is.

-Is it a pebble?

-How did you know?!

At least Lynne and her family found something a little more interesting.

We'd found a piece of blue sea glass, we'd found a piece of green,

and on that day I was the one with shorts,

so I had them in my pocket.

So far, so good.

In fact, it wasn't until Lynne got home

that things took a turn for the sinister.

I came home. I was sitting at this counter,

and I was peeling an orange,

and all of a sudden this intense heat,

this intense...pain was hitting my leg.

So, logically, I felt like it must be a bug.

Had Lynne inadvertently brought back a nasty nipper from the beach?

You mean...a shark?

In her pocket?

A...baby shark?

I mean like a scorpion hiding in one of the shells.

Or a deadly cone snail with barbs poised to paralyse.

I decide to smack my leg to kill whatever's on my leg,

and what ends up happening is I look down,

and there are flames shooting off of my shorts!

My husband started yelling,

"Get your shorts off, get your shorts off!"

And I'm trying to undo them with one burned hand.

He was pulling them off,

the stones were coming out of the burnt hole

and dropping on the ground

and creating small fires each place they would land.

Now, someone's shorts catching fire may sound like a bit of a joke,

but the burning rocks in Lynne's pocket

ended up costing her ten days in hospital with severe burns.

Ouch! But how does a stone set fire to your shorts?

Hold on to your test tubes, Naomi.

It's science time.

There are many elements that can self-ignite.

Some, like sodium, are stable in air but react violently in water.

One, however, does the complete opposite.

Phosphorus.

In water, it's nice and stable.

But when it's taken out of water,

it spontaneously combusts with the oxygen in the air.

-Whoa.

-Yeah, whoa.

Burning at around 1,300 Celsius,

it's hot enough to melt iron or steel,

and poor old Lynne had inadvertently picked up a piece of damp phosphorus

from the beach. Once in her pocket,

it began to dry out, finally igniting,

with catastrophic results.

Er, Tim, what does phosphorus look like?

Er, it's orange and clear, looks a bit like amber.

-SHE GASPS

-Er, you mean, like this?

-Oooh! Yeah!

SHE PANTS

Oh. Oh, no, actually, it's OK.

You're welcome.

HE BREATHES OUT

And if you like beachcombing too, then please don't worry,

because it turns out the phosphorus Lynne found was part of an old

artillery shell left over from a military exercise.

So the chances of you ever picking up a self-igniting stone

are practically zero.

You know, burning rocks are pretty impressive,

but I think I may be able to go one better.

-Really?

-Yeah, have a look at this.

We're heading back to California yet again, this time to Twain Harte,

a small holiday town popular with families.

Twain Harte in the summer, for us and our family, it's a getaway.

It's where we go to relax.

It's crowded.

You know, the beach is full,

there's kids screaming and running and people walking their dogs.

Oh, no, something bad's going to happen, isn't it? Isn't it?

So we were hiking along and decided to go across the dam to the rock.

All of a sudden, it was like a bomb went off.

RUMBLING

It wasn't made of phosphorus, was it?

No, but Steve and his family were forced to flee for their lives.

A crack appeared from the back of the rock

and started moving toward us.

Explosions were coming out of the crevice.

It was terrifying for the kids and for us

because we really didn't know what was going on.

At first, Steve suspected it was an earthquake.

They regularly strike California, causing serious damage. But...

We started to realise that it really wasn't an earthquake

because, being from the Bay Area,

we'd felt earthquakes and it was just very different.

So, with no explanations on the table for these explosive events,

it was time to call in the experts.

-The Navy SEALs.

-The geologists.

Them, too.

Dr Martha Eppes set out to interrogate the rock.

You can't interrogate a rock!

Rocks aren't like people!

Rocks are like people.

They get stressed, and they react to stresses in very different ways.

Rocks can accommodate stress and deal with it,

or if the stress is strong enough, they break.

Dr Eppes had a very simple theory

for what might have caused the rock at Twain Harte to break.

On the week leading up to August 3rd at Twain Harte,

you had temperatures that were ten degrees above normal.

And then the day that the rock cracked

was actually ten degrees below normal.

Yes. A sudden fall in temperature after weeks of drought

was all it took to set off these explosive events.

Huh. Please explain further,

preferably with the use of illustrative graphics.

No problem. Weeks of hot sun caused the rock to expand and rise up.

Squeezing it against the surrounding rocks.

Exactly. Then, as the pressure built,

a sudden fall in temperature caused the surface of the rock to rapidly

cool and contract, and...

-Boom!

-The surface cracked to release the pressure,

splitting apart in layers, a bit like an onion.

Only an onion doesn't explode in your face.

True.

So, with this peculiar case of exploding rocks, one thing is clear.

Yep, never go to California on a holiday.

Actually, I was going to say the forces of nature

will never fail to surprise us.

Mm, that works as well, I suppose.

I'm going to finish this washing-up. What are you going to do?

I think I'm going to take Rover for a little walk.

There's a good boy. Come on, walkies!

Heel. That's right, good boy.

# They're wild and weird Wild and weird

# Really, really wild and really, really weird

# They're wild and weird Wild and weird

# They're really, really wild

# They're really, really wild and weird... #

Wild and weird!