Abstract
Conventional wisdom assumes the mud in earth's mudrocks took millions of years to settle. New experiments suggest a better idea. Just about everyone has had fun playing in mud at some time in life. As a child, I liked to play with muddy water, too. I'd scoop up a bucket of the water and watch all the fine mud particles that were suspended in the water slowly sink to the bottom. It sometimes took days. I remember when my teacher had me do an experiment in class as a child. I noticed another thing. We put a large amount of water and dirt (a mixture of mud, silt, and sand) into a glass jar, shook it up, and watched how the different dirt particles settled. The larger sand particles fell rapidly to the bottom, followed by the smaller and slower particles (which I learned were called silt). But the fine mud particles stayed suspended in the water for many hours before finally settling on the bottom, on top of the sand and silt layers.