Emergent Geometry
How do landscapes in arctic climates become covered with geometric patterns made from rocks and soil? mark Kessler, then a University of California San Diego graduate student wondered, and watched and experimented with freezing and thawing mixes of landscape and came up with the answer. Natural, normal and dependent on initial conditions but completely divorced from the physics of the materials. They are emergent structures generated by thousands of years of reflexive reiterations of tiny processes that produce results at a higher scale. Seriously cool.

"There is nothing in the physics of a shovelful of stony mud that can predict the emergence of an intricate pattern of interlaced, stone- bordered polygons covering many square meters," wrote University of Alaska researcher Daniel Mann in an essay accompanying the Science paper.