Wisconsin Rock Rings

I can't make that link work. Putting www. in front is dead.

Could not find this link

They look like rings made by someone with a red swiss army knife.

Try this: Rings Contest

An animal walking across a muddy area will kick up droplets of mud. As the droplets land in the mud they'll create muddy rings that can dry in place. Don't know if this scenario would apply to these rings or not. /tldnr

...and air (or rising methane gas) can make rings when it pops through the surface.

Wisconsin, being one of the few locations on earth with naturally occurring cheese, may have been a source for this methane, or "meethane" as it is pronounced on the BBC.

My first thought, too - but doesn't explain the concentric rings.

Used to collect limpets when I was a youngster, they normally mark two rings? The inner ring made by its body that grips onto the rock, and the outer ring with its shell. They lift their shell when feeding, and slams it down, and grip hard onto the rock with its body, when in danger. Used to collect them on a beach that had dinosaur footprints from the early Triassic period. Don't know if limpets have been around for that long?

Regards JD.

I've only ever seen the outer ring (made by the shell), but I guess it depends on the type of rock.

Merlin went back in time in time to a mud flat in Wisconsin. There he wrote special message about how to make the land a warm, lush paradise. He then realized this might be too cryptic for mere mortals so he assembled the Stonehenge playground and left clear instructions on how to suspend the swings in between the plinths.

Actually they look like popped mud bubbles that hardened before leveling.

Or, Merlin sat down to ponder his dilemma, and set his beer bottles on the stone, and they left marks. When I left beer bottle marks on the table, I wanted to go to Wisconsin also.

Ancient coffee cups perhaps?

Whomever wins the prize can buy me a coke.

I recently had a similar looking piece of rock from a Syenite sill analysed , The main component wa FeCO3 and MnCO3 ansd Kaolin (Al..). the Kaolin was concentrated in 1 cm bubbles. It could be that the slow cooling was interrupted and caused the rings. Another sample of sedimentary dolomite pebbles of about 50mm were formed and year rings could be observed.

Rings? They don't look like rings to me. They look as concentric CYLINDRICAL rock inclusions (not necesarily of different material or origin) that for some reason when rock is broken abeam their center line, produce those circles because of signifficant differences in shearing strength, that for some reason varies by a function of the distance from a centerline. That shearing strength difference could be because of the conditions at the time of solidification but it also can be from gravity or pressure difference induced linear movement of a liquid or gass through that point of rock mass at a period long before rock aquired its full solid characteristics, at a time it was just sediment for example. Anyway factors that gave these shapes are IMHO perfectly explainable geologically. S.M.

I think the clue lies in photo 2 in the main link. It shows a cluster of rings that generally do not overlap. Given the scale indicated by the dime the impressions could be made by a bed of reeds or similar grasses growing at the edge of a lake. The reeds have died and rotted away leaving an impression in the mud that was subsequently filled by more mud. Looking back at photo 1a, the one we were shown, there are matching male and female impressions so whatever created the void went deep into the mud and was not just a surface feature. This would support my rotted reeds theory.

That's definitely some kind of coin in photo2.

Something to do with middle earth?

How about fossilised jelly fish.

I'm with you on the jellyfish. It explains the second ring following the same shape as the first ring, jellyfish today having that sort of structure. Could also be tube worms if the ring goes down through the rock to some depth. These amazing creatures live today at incredible depths in hostile environments. I don't know if they were extant way back then.May also have been floral. A type of plant like bamboo. So hard to tell from here.Jim

I saw that the rock age was approximately in the range of common invertebrate life forms in the Cambrian age near the change to the Ordovician age, at 500MMY age.

I closely inspected the photographs, and it appears that some large rings have a second ring that is near concentric.

The statistical information strongly suggests that a life-form made this, due to exclusivity in a location, and a clearly defined mode of the normal distribution.

Gas bubble tracks in mud are doubtful to last long enough if the water is shallow and there are currents. There would not be exclusivity of a location.

It seems likely that the mud or sand sediment has already "set" into a harder material that remains soft enough for the life form to make an impression using its hold-fast mechanism.

Limpets would make a groove with their teeth in that sediment, then either die off (a tilted surface was suggested) and fall away. However, no fossil shell remains is a problem, and no mention of fossilized shells in rock found below the ring structures was ever mentioned.

Could it be possible that an early ancestral limpet class did not possess a calcareous shell? Could it be that another life form fed on these defenseless invertebrates? Who knows.