Growth resembling cotton candy sprouting from rocks in Carlsbad Caverns National Park

Mysteries are constantly being found inside Carlsbad Caverns National Park and the latest suggests some rocks inside New Mexico’s extensive cave system are alive.

Specifically, they appear to be sprouting hair. Not a little, but big, fluffy tufts of it.

It’s gotten so thick that some are starting to resemble balls of cotton, based on a photo shared on Facebook by the National Park Service.

“No, it’s not cotton candy!” Carlsbad Caverns officials reported in an Oct. 15 post. “This fluffy material is a mineral that appears during the colder and dryer parts of the year.”

It’s called Thenardite and it’s temporarily, developing only after humidity drops in the winter, then vanishing when it rises again, the park says. In layman’s terms, it’s the “salt form of sulfuric acid,” according to the National Center for Biotechnical Information.

“The elements for it are present in the cave, but will only crystallize through a process known as efflorescence, on certain surfaces when the air is dry enough,” park officials said.

Experts say most formations in the park’s 175 miles of cave system are dormant. “There are still areas that are active. Anywhere you see water dripping, the cave is growing,” the park reported in an Oct. 16 Facebook post.

Among the many oddities found in the caves have been fossils that date to when when “the Guadalupe Mountains used to be a large reef system in the Permian Sea,” the park says. That’s more than 265 million years ago, according to the National Park Service.

“After the sea dried up, so too did the reef, leaving behind many different fossils to appreciate in the cave,” the park says.

In June, scientists revealed a “virgin” cave passage in the park was found to contain an isolated pool of liquid that had “never before been seen by humans,” McClatchy News said. The shallow pool is 700 feet under the entrance of Lechuguilla Cave, a cave “in the back country of Carlsbad Caverns National Park,” it was reported.

This story was originally published October 19, 2020 at 1:15 PM with the headline "Growth resembling cotton candy sprouting from rocks in Carlsbad Caverns National Park."