Pages, some stolen, some original

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Grass

So I'm looking over the latest posts on Graham Hancock's website, and I come across one talking about "Mysterious Fairy Circles":
Walter Tschinkel may not have solved the mystery of the fairy circles, but he can tell you that they’re alive. Tens of thousands of the formations — bare patches of soil, 2 to 12 meters in diameter — freckle grasslands from southern Angola to northern South Africa, their perimeters often marked by a tall fringe of grass. Locals say they’re the footprints of the gods. Scientists have thrown their hands up in the air. But now Tschinkel, a biologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, has discovered something no one else has.
Hmmm, somebody has figured out something new. Let's take a look, so I do and I see green grass:


Well, something like that ought to visible from a satellite, so I look up NamibRand Nature Reserve on Google Maps:

Area shown is about 75 miles by 50.

That doesn't look like grass, that looks like sand. I poke around for a bit and I find some scrub brush, but I don't find anything that looks like grass, so I complain to the author, who promptly replies with this useful tip: "zoom down to about 300 m eye altitude". Could that really be? But I do as I am bid, and the "fairy circles" do indeed appear:


Red grass. Hmmph. Where are we? Mars?

Update December 2016. Added this line so anyone searching for Namibia will find this post.
Update November 2021 replaced missing map.


No comments:

Post a Comment