Woah dude this is fantastic. I’ve definitely seen this stuff in some places like in unpaved parking lots.

Another mystery this has solved for me that I forgot to look into is washboarding on roads. If you’ve ever been to Chilean Patagonia you’ll know that the national park roads there have extraordinary traffic and consequently have quite an intense amount of washboarding. I thought perhaps this was some intentional structure wrought to give cars purchase when the roads are wet. It’s actually because of wheels acting as friction and pushing material forward to some point after which they proceed over it and repeat. It is surprisingly periodic and I thought surely intentionally built.

As an aside, I skipped over the video and ended up reading the text (which suspiciously was like an article without web assets loaded) and I wonder if use of AI could have built a freeze frame article out of this. The video is 18 min long but the text can be read in a fraction of the time.

Regardless, top quality link. Very interesting stuff. Surprisingly old too. We’ve had the tech for 50 years and we have used it in a widespread fashion in the civil world for three decades or so.