The simulator demonstrates how tensile stress builds up in a cooling, contracting sheet of rock, how that stress triggers crack nucleation once it exceeds fracture strength, and how many simultaneously growing cracks self-organize through their competing stress fields into a near-hexagonal polygon network, while also showing how the cooling-front direction sets each column's growth axis.
Set the cooling rate and cooling-surface uniformity, then start the simulation to watch crack-initiation points appear across the surface and grow inward. Adjust the cooling-boundary shape to see column axes curve to follow the changing heat-flow direction, and compare fast, uneven cooling runs against slow, uniform ones to see how column width, straightness, and hexagonal regularity change.
Sliders for cooling rate, cooling uniformity, and initial rock temperature; a toggle for cooling-surface geometry (flat versus irregular) to control heat-flow direction and column curvature; a play/pause/reset control for the crack-growth animation; and a display toggle to overlay isotherms, stress field, or resulting column-side-count statistics.
Did you know the individual crack-growth increments that build each column are often preserved as faint horizontal ridges on the column faces, called chisel marks, essentially a natural growth-ring record of exactly how far the crack advanced during each pause in the cooling process?
The simulator demonstrates how tensile stress builds up in a cooling, contracting sheet of rock, how that stress triggers crack nucleation once it exceeds fracture strength, and how many simultaneously growing cracks self-organize through their competing stress fields into a near-hexagonal polygon network, while also showing how the cooling-front direction sets each column's growth axis.
The simulator demonstrates how tensile stress builds up in a cooling, contracting sheet of rock, how that stress triggers crack nucleation once it exceeds fracture strength, and how many simultaneously growing cracks self-organize through their competing stress fields into a near-hexagonal polygon network, while also showing how the cooling-front direction sets each column's growth axis.
Set the cooling rate and cooling-surface uniformity, then start the simulation to watch crack-initiation points appear across the surface and grow inward. Adjust the cooling-boundary shape to see column axes curve to follow the changing heat-flow direction, and compare fast, uneven cooling runs against slow, uniform ones to see how column width, straightness, and hexagonal regularity change.
Did you know the individual crack-growth increments that build each column are often preserved as faint horizontal ridges on the column faces, called chisel marks, essentially a natural growth-ring record of exactly how far the crack advanced during each pause in the cooling process?