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China Ranch Dry Mud

This mud has dried in a moderately angular pattern, somewhere between the sharp angles in the photo above and the softer shapes formed by drying mud in the photos below.

 

Like clay, mud is made out of particles that literally float in a matrix of water molecules. When the water starts to escape, water molecules, which are attached to one another through cohesion, begin to follow up toward the surface. Masses of water will escape where a few molecules went before, and this, in addition to properties of the mud particles, provides the distinctive patterns of drying we see here.

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Uploaded on January 25, 2010
Taken on December 22, 2009