In the western part of the Sahara Desert, there is a place that many travel lovers would dream of visiting. Among the monotonous desert landscape, circles stand out, as if drawn by someone's gigantic, unknown hand.
This place has many names: the Rishat structure, the Eye of the Earth, the Eye of the Desert, the navel of the Earth. This is explained by the fact that the complex of giant rings is very similar to the pupil of the human eye, framed by the contours of the eyelids.
STRANGE RINGS
The Richat structure was discovered about half a century ago, in 1965, during the first space flights. There is nothing surprising in the fact that before the beginning of the space era, the Eye of the Sahara was not noticed, because the diameter of its outer contour is about 50 kilometers, so the rings can be seen only from a considerable height.
On the spot, everything looks like a rocky desert with a series of various lowlands and hills. The structure was formed gradually, ring by ring. In the process of research, scientists managed to establish the age of this geological formation - 600 million years, that is, it has existed since the Proterozoic period.
The nature of the rings has long been a mystery to geologists. When viewed from afar, the picture that opens to the eye seems to be a destroyed volcano or a crater left by a meteorite.
There are many versions of the origin of the Oka, but we can already say for sure that volcanic rocks in these places have not been found, as well as traces of a powerful blow. Scientists were able to establish that the Richat structure has the shape of a truncated tectonic dome. At the time of the dinosaurs, that is, in the Cretaceous period, a dome-shaped rearing of the earth's crust occurred here, and then, under the influence of precipitation and winds, the above-ground part was cut to the ground.
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The circles we see today are layers of hard quartzite. They form ridges about 100 meters high with steep cliffs to the center of the Oka and gentle slopes on the outside.
Due to its enormous size and clear outlines against the backdrop of the endless sands of the Sahara, the Eye of the Earth serves as a kind of reference point for cosmonauts. Thus, Valentin Lebedev, examining an amazing round in shape and unusual in structure geological object from the window of the Salyut-7 station, realized that he associates him with a children's pyramid, assembled from rings of various colors.
It would seem that such lifeless and mysterious landscapes should cause fear and apprehension in a person. Nevertheless, several one-story buildings have already been erected here, serving as something of a hotel for thrill-seekers, and they are not empty.
ALL WINE METEORITE
As for scientists, they still cannot come to a common conclusion about the cause of this geological formation.
The very first hypothesis put forward by researchers was that the Eye of the Earth is a crater formed at the site of a giant meteorite. However, attempts to collect the evidence base were unsuccessful. Scientists were unable to find any traces of the impact of a space body on the ground, or the consequences of this impact. The bottom of the ring formation has a flat shape, there are no depressions, as well as signs of the impact of a shock wave on the rocks surrounding the Oko.
In addition, the supporters of the crater version failed to explain the presence of not one, but several rings, ideally nested into each other. Indeed, in order to achieve such a pattern, several meteorites of different sizes must fall into this place with high accuracy, which simply cannot be.
DORMANT VOLCANO
For a long time, the volcanic version of ring formation looked the most plausible. It was based on images of ring structures found on Mars, the Moon and Mercury.
In 1985, in the textbook "General Geotectonics" even a section on this phenomenon appeared. The authors explained the origin of the ring structures as a result of the eruption of an ancient volcano many centuries ago.
But here's the bad luck - the Eye consists mainly of sedimentary dolomite rocks, there are absolutely no volcanic rocks and traces of a volcanic dome in it. Therefore, the volcanic theory does not stand up to criticism, despite the fact that the perfectly round shape of the mysterious rings fits perfectly into it.
COSMODROM
When something is impossible to explain, the most fantastic assumptions arise. So in the case of the Eye, versions immediately appeared that an alien spacecraft landed here millions of years ago, and the rings are a trace from it.
There are even those who claim that Atlantis was here, but no one has evidence of these versions. And no anomalies are observed in this area. Shepherds live quietly, graze camels. In short, everything is calm in the Sahara.
MULTI-AGE EROSION
The version that the Eye of the Sahara was formed naturally as a result of ongoing geological processes turned out to be the most provable. According to the scientists who put forward this hypothesis, the platform in this place either rose or fell, while the wind and water currents affected it. As a result of erosion, which lasted tens of millions of years, the water washed away soft limestone and left a much harder and stronger quartzite, which led to such a layered formation.
But even this plausible theory does not fully explain how rings of such regular shape arose in the middle of the desert. This means that the question is still open.
TWIN BROTHER
Very similar to the Eye of the Sahara, the Siberian Eye is the Konder ridge, the only mountain range in the world that has a ring-shaped shape. Looking at this miracle of nature, Conan Doyle's “The Lost World” involuntarily comes to mind. The ridge is located 1,000 kilometers north of Khabarovsk.
Of course, it is much smaller than the Richat structure - only eight kilometers in diameter, but it looks no less impressive. The ridge rises 800 meters above the surrounding landscape and resembles a lunar or Martian crater in images taken from space.
Evenks and Yakuts consider Konder a sacred mountain and call it Urgula. In the northern part of the ridge, there is a place where it opens, and the Konder River flows from here. This name was given to it by the discoverers, who, apparently, compared it with a camp soup (konder is a liquid porridge, a chowder of millet with bacon and onions).
Those who visited the inside of the ring said that the vegetation there is richer than on the outside, the fruits and berries are much larger. In addition, Conder turned out to be a storehouse of minerals, precious metals and the world's largest alluvial platinum deposit. The largest nuggets of platinum on Earth weighing up to 3.5 kilograms were discovered here. Moreover, some of them are crystalline.
Since 1984, more than 50 minerals, elements of the platinum group, as well as gold and silver have been discovered at Condor. The ridge is located in a hard-to-reach place; the prospectors get here only by air or by winter roads. Each season, more than 300 miners are employed in mining operations, 14 units wash the rock, extracting a large amount of precious metal.
The infrastructure existing here (houses, shops, sports grounds, the Platinum Arena palace) is designed only for miners. This area is closed for tourists. What to do - a field of national importance.
Despite active development in this area, scientists still doubt the origin of the Sibirskiy Oka. There is a version that the ridge owes its appearance to magmatic intrusion. Due to volcanic activity, molten masses fell from deep into the upper layers of the earth's crust.
Since the magma masses were pushed to the surface with insufficient force, they only bulged the surface shale, thus forming a round ridge. But this, alas, does not explain its ideally annular shape …
Galina BELYSHEVA