The Cellar - Mar 11th, 2017: Mima Mounds

No Mima is not an exotic dancer, this is a request from blueboy56 to see Mima Mounds.
It's like a field full of boobies so we know where he's at. :haha:

Wiki says...

Quote:

Mima mounds are low, flattened, circular to oval, domelike, natural mounds that are composed of loose, unstratified, often gravelly sediment that is an over thickened A Horizon. These mounds range in diameter from 3 to more than 50 m; in height 30 cm to greater than 2 m; and in density from several to greater than 50 mounds per hectare, at times forming conspicuous natural patterns. Mima mounds can be seen at the Mima Mounds Natural Area Preserve in Washington State.
Theories for the origin of Mima mounds include burrowing by pocket gophers; accumulation of wind-blown (aeolian) sediments around vegetation to form coppice dunes or nebkhas; seismic ground shaking by major earthquakes, though none have been observed to form Mima mounds; and shrinking and swelling of clays in hog-wallow or gilgai landforms.

http://cellar.org/2017/Mima-mounds.jpg

But Live Science dot com leads with the headline, "Mima Mound Mystery Solved" Click bait again.
The content reads...

Quote:

The model suggests that gophers start pushing soil toward any existing high spots, and these budding mounds continue to beckon later generations of builders. "There's a positive feedback where the gophers are somehow sensing where the high spots are," Gabet said.
Eventually, the burrowing mammals run out of soil and the Mima mounds are fully "developed" — which takes 500 to 700 years. "There's an end stage where the mounds don't grow any higher," Gabet said.
The size of each mature Mima mound roughly matches the territorial range of a single gopher, Gabet discovered.

Though the study isn't proof that gophers create Mima mounds, it does show that it's possible, said Ronald Sletten, a soil scientist at the University of Washington who has studied the state's Mima mounds.

That sounds hardly conclusive to me. :eyebrow:
OK, blueboy?