In the late 1930s, workers clearing the impenetrable jungle in the Costa Rican Dikis delta for a banana plantation found large granite balls in the swamp. They lay half-submerged in the moss, some were covered with river silt.
The largest ones reached 3 meters in diameter and weighed about 16 tons. And the smallest were no more than a child's ball, having only 10 centimeters in diameter. The balls were placed singly and in groups from three to fifty pieces, sometimes they were geometric shapes. One group of balls was aligned with a line pointing to magnetic north.
Measurements showed that the balls were made very accurately: deviations from the spherical shape are only half a centimeter for the largest. The granite surface is smoothly sanded. But when, why and who made the stone balls? Locals claim that the ancient Indians possessed the now lost secret of a special liquid that softened granite and turned it into clay. After that, the Indians allegedly sculpted balls of any size from "soft granite", and after a while the stone hardened again.
Nevertheless, archaeologists did not believe the legends. At first, they assumed that the balloons marked the burial sites. However, in the process of excavation, no remains, weapons, ornaments were found. Then a version appeared that the granite balls served some kind of religious purpose.
The method of transporting these balls also remains a mystery - from their location to the places of the alleged origin of the material for their production tens of kilometers, a significant part of which falls on swamps and dense thickets of tropical forests. Archaeologist Doris Stone ended her report on the exploration of the balls of Costa Rica with the words: "We must classify the perfect spheres of Costa Rica as incomprehensible megalithic mysteries."
In recent years, the ball story has taken an unexpected turn. It turned out that balls of the correct shape can arise in nature without human participation, in a natural way. In southern Brazil, sandstone balls began to be found. They differ from granite Costa Rican in size (the largest - only half a meter in diameter) and rough finish - the surface is not polished, there are balls of irregular shape and "Siamese twins" - balls fused with sides.
Geologists have tried to explain how they could have arisen. The porous sandstone was filled with a salt lake. Water saturated with mineral salts slowly seeped into the pores. Bumping into fragments of the calcite mineral scattered in the thickness of the sandstone, this strong solution began to crystallize around them, gluing the grains of sand into a solid mass.
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Crystallization proceeded uniformly in all directions from the centers of calcite fragments. Thus, denser balls appeared in the depths of the porous stone. As time went on, the lake dried up, the sandstone appeared on land and began to collapse. The balls lying in the thickness of the sandstone were stronger than the rest of the rock, so when the sandstone collapsed under the influence of rains and winds, the balls remained. It is clear how the twin balls turned out: if the fragments of calcite lay too close to each other, the growing balls collided, coalesced.
However, these assumptions do not explain the reasons for the appearance of granite balls. While the sandstone balls appear to be of natural origin, the granite specimens clearly show traces of artificial leveling and grinding.
In addition to Central America, stone balls have been found on the coast of New Zealand, Egypt, Romania, Germany, Brazil, Franz Joseph Land and the Kashkadarya region of Kazakhstan.
Giant stone balls of unknown origin were discovered in the Ust-Ilimsky district (Irkutsk region) by workers of the Zheronsky coal mine. According to numerous eyewitnesses, in the summer of 2008, when removing the top layer of the earth with an excavator bucket, spherical stones stuck out in the wall along the side, like in an egg cell. When the ground was cut again, the "balls" rolled out one after the other.
The most amazing thing is that almost all of them were of the same size, as if specially carefully calibrated.
Thousands of giant stone balls lie along the crescent-shaped Kasatka Bay of Iturup Island, and at high tide, when they rub against each other, there is a dull, angry grinding.
Iturup Island is the largest in the Kuril ridge. On its southern Pacific coast, from the depths of the sea rises a bay with a dark gray boulder placer, consisting of many rounded boulders and stone balls - gray, brown and black. The width of the cyclopean ribbon beach is almost ten meters, the length is kilometers. On the flanks of the horseshoe bay are weathered black rocks. Along the entire strip is a rugged jungle of sasa bamboo, giant grass and thorny rose hips, whose red berry is the size of an egg.
Balls of the arctic Champa island
The powerful surf of the Killer Whale, joking as if playing with balls, pushes heavy stones out of the icy water. Their shape is from an egg to a regular ball. The average length of the boulder is half a meter, but there are also more significant ones. Large balls weigh 600 - 700 kg, while larger stones weigh many tons. They, under the weight of their enormous weight, firmly entered the ground, and no waves could push them.
Different things are said about the origin of the coastal Kuril balls. Some believe that these are rounded pieces of rocks. Others claim they are volcanic bombs. But serious researchers have found out that gigantic balls have nothing to do with volcanoes. Fiery mountains spew out rapidly cooling vitreous rocks - basalt, andesite, liparite and pumice. And the huge "gloomy" watermelons of the Killer Whale Bay are tertiary granite, born in the bowels of the Earth.
The cyclopean beach of giant stones is a miracle of nature, but for the Kuriles it is not unique. Shores with boulder hordes can be found on Kunashir, Paramushir and other islands of the Kuril ridge. Stone balls are still a mystery of nature.
Irina STREKALOVA