There’s a place in Chile’s Atacama Desert where trails of depressions punctuate the fine chusca dust. But what might seem like the footsteps left by a giant creature are in fact exquisitely preserved evidence of boulders that tumbled down a nearby cliff face before bouncing to their final resting place.

The site, the Chuculay Boulder Field, is home to thousands of granite goliaths, some as big as houses. And because the desert’s hyper-arid conditions preserve the boulders’ steps, it’s “an ideal place to study rockfall theory and physics,” said Paul Morgan, a geologist at Cornell University.

Mr. Morgan and his collaborators analyzed the trajectories of some of these boulders and presented their research last week at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. Their findings of how far boulders tumble are useful for designing structures that could protect people and property in rockfall-prone areas.

In July 2018, Mr. Morgan and his collaborators from Cornell and Chile’s Universidad Católica del Norte pitched tents amid the granite giants of Chuculay. A 1,000-foot-high scarp, a geological feature created by a tectonic fault, towered nearby. The site’s rocks probably tumbled down from that scarp during one of the numerous earthquakes experienced in tectonically active Chile, the researchers hypothesize.