It would seem that there can be interesting things in the endless desert. But in fact, it is among the endless sands that the unsolved mysteries of the world lie. Dead cities, about which there is not a single mention in history, monuments depicting advanced ancient knowledge, anomalous artifacts - all these mysteries of the desert have yet to be solved by humanity.
1. Circles of fairies
Scattered throughout the Namib Desert are millions of evenly spaced circles. Their edges are lined with knee-high grass, but nothing grows inside the circles, even if fertile soil is poured there. The mystery surrounding the origins of these circles has spawned many theories over the decades, but none have been proven.
Scientists speculated that the circles could be the result of termites, ostriches and zebras swimming in the sand, the growth of poisonous plants and fungi, or gas seeping out of the ground.
Most of these fairy circles appear in the Namib Desert, 1,800 kilometers up to the Cape in South Africa. The sizes of the fairy circles range from 2 to 20 meters, and after 75 years they disappear. What makes them disappear is also unknown.
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2. Strange graves
In the Valley of the Kings, the same necropolis where the remains of King Tutankhamen were discovered, a 3,000-year-old mystery has recently been discovered. In 2005, a limestone chamber was found under the huts of ancient workers, which contained 28 huge vessels and seven coffins.
All coffins were carefully sealed, and some of them were decorated with yellow faces. But none of the coffins contained the remains of bodies - they and the jars were filled with pieces of pottery, stones, dirt, cloth, wood and powder used in mummification.
One of the coffins was even placed inside the other. Why this was done is a mystery. There are theories that the strange contents were waste from the embalming of other mummies, but why they needed to be sealed in vessels, coffins and taken out to the place where the royal burials were held is unclear.
3. Gas emissions
In 2003, a satellite measuring methane levels found a deadly cloud of this greenhouse gas as it passed over the Four Corners geographic region in the United States. Four Corners is the intersection of the states of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah.
Something was emitting a shocking amount of methane equal to 10 percent of the annual emissions of that gas in the entire United States.
This phenomenon continued for six years and then mysteriously ceased. Researchers are still trying to discover the origin of vast amounts of methane, a gas that has a greater impact on global warming than carbon dioxide.
4. Syrian ruins
There are ruins in the deserts of Syria that are older than the pyramids. They are the last remnants of a mysterious city that once stood 80 kilometers from modern Damascus. It turns out that the ancient city of Damascus, founded 5,000 years ago, is young compared to these ruins.
In 2009, archaeologist Robert Mason was excavating a fourth or fifth century Syrian monastery when he discovered unusual tombs, as well as stone rows and circles. Mason also found wall-like formations, which he called "desert snakes", and rocky traps, into which gazelles and other animals may have been driven.
Pieces of stone tools found in the immediate vicinity of these structures allowed Mason to determine the age of his finds - from 6,000 to 10,000 years.
The first pyramids and the Great Pyramid at Giza are believed to have been built 4500 years ago. Who built the city and where it disappeared is still unknown. Due to the war and regular conflicts in the region, it is impossible to properly investigate this desert enigma.
5. Unknown artifacts
The world's oldest stone tools have been found in the barren desert lands of Kenya. A discovery made in 2011 could disprove the age-old belief that only the ancestors of modern humans began to make ancient instruments.
The 149 stone artifacts are roughly 3.3 million years old, and no known human ancestors existed at the time. Scientists do not know who made these primitive tools, but they argue that they have nothing to do with people (meaning the ancestors of humans from the species Homo).
It is believed that the first to make tools began the Homo habilis, who appeared somewhere 2.6-2.5 million years ago. Australopithecus and other Pithecanthropus who lived on Earth before him, officially did not know how to make stone tools.
6. Atacama nitrates
Charles Darwin called the Atacama Desert "a place where nothing can exist." This South American desert is considered the driest place on the planet, in this place, at best, 1 mm of rainfall per year. But this desert contains the richest source of nitrates and iodine deposits in the world.
The mystery is that this arid region simply lacks the bacteria needed to form nitrates and iodine deposits.
7. Holes in Pisco
Everyone knows about the Nazca geoglyphs, but few have heard of another ancient secret of Peru. In an arid area near the Pisco Valley, thousands of cone-shaped holes have been found that were cut by someone unknown.
The design of the holes-pits themselves depends on the rock on which this depression is built. On the earthen slopes closer to the valley, these are just pits in the loose rock of the hill; in the same place where stony ground predominates - the depressions are made in the form of shallow wells or rectangles, resembling small graves.
Some speculate that the holes were used as granaries or graves, but no food remains or burial traces were found in them. According to preliminary estimates, there are about 6,900 such holes in a strip about 1.5 km long and about 20 meters wide.
8. Nabta Playa
In the Sahara Desert, there is a megalithic structure that is 1000 years older than Stonehenge. The place, named Nabta Playa, is a ring of stones in five rows. Stones up to 2.7 meters in height weigh several tons.
This unknown structure is estimated to be between 6,000 and 6,500 years old, making it the oldest archaeoastronomical monument. In this place were found burials of cattle, as well as various objects, but human remains are completely absent.
9. Spider painting
A unique piece of art has been discovered in the desert in western Egypt. A sandstone rock slab at Kharga Oasis (175 kilometers west of Luxor) depicts what is believed to be the only spider rock in the entire Old World.
The exact age of the slab split in two is difficult to establish, but Egyptologists believe it dates from around 4000 BC, when Egypt did not even exist.
10. Desert glass
Tests on a scarab gem that once belonged to King Tutu showed that the glass in it was made before the first Egyptian civilization. A little later, scientists discovered an area in the Sahara Desert, in which mysterious blocks of glass lurked under the sand.
After the atomic bomb test in New Mexico in 1945, the sand melted into a rather thin layer of glass, unlike the huge blocks in Egypt. Whatever it was, but it had to provide a temperature higher than in a nuclear explosion.
And in Southeast Asia, an 800,000-year-old glass block with an area of almost 800 square kilometers was found. This suggests that something even more dangerous happened there than in Egypt.