• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Mystery As Hundreds More Fairy Circle Sites Found Across The World

September 28, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

For decades people have been stumped by the existence of “fairy circles”, strange circular patterns found in arid regions of Namibia and Western Australia.

Various explanations have been proposed over the years for the formations – from harvester termites to Turing mechanisms.  Complicating the mystery, or perhaps giving us the information we need to solve it, a team of researchers has now discovered hundreds more sites containing the fairy circles. 

Advertisement

Using satellite images and artificial intelligence-based models to examine 574,799 plots of dryland, researchers found fairy circle-like patterns in 263 locations across 15 countries and three continents. This included Namibia and Western Australia, as well as the Sahel, Western Sahara, the Horn of Africa, Madagascar, Southwest Asia, and Central Australia.

“Our study provides evidence that fairy circles are far more common than previously thought,” co-author of the study Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo said in a statement, “which has allowed us, for the first time, to globally understand the factors affecting their distribution.”

The team found that the fairy circles occurred in fairly similar conditions, in soil with low nitrogen content and in areas with an average rainfall of less than 200 millimeters (8 inches) per year.

“In addition to these factors, the presence of specific biological elements (termite nests) in certain regions also plays a role in the presence of these patterns,” the team added in their study. 

Advertisement

More intriguingly, the team found that vegetation production in these fairy circle regions was greater and more stable than in regions without them.

“These results provide the first empirical evidence of increased stability of fairy circle productivity, a key property of ecosystems that is related to the stable provision of ecosystem services such as the amount of forage,” Fernando T. Maestre, professor and director of the Laboratory of Arid Zone Ecology and Global Change at the University of Alicante, said.

Further study at a local level at these sites is needed to determine their cause, the team said in their paper. The researchers have made a global atlas of fairy circles available to help enable it.

The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Chinese court rules against #MeToo plaintiff
  2. France says Mali must stick to election timetable
  3. Blinken meets Lopez Obrador to soothe thorny U.S.-Mexico relations
  4. What Would Happen To Humanity If All Microbes Suddenly Disappeared?

Source Link: Mystery As Hundreds More Fairy Circle Sites Found Across The World

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • PhD Students’ Groundbreaking New Technique Rescues JWST’s Highest Resolution Data
  • Popcorn-Like Parasites And Weird Worms Among 14 New Species Discovered In The World’s Oceans
  • Poem From 1181 CE Cairo Appears To Reference A Rare Galactic Supernova
  • With “Iridescent Live Colors”, Newly Discovered Beautiful Dwarfgoby Lives Up To Its Name (Mostly)
  • “Anti-Tail” And Odd 594-Kilometer Feature Found On Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS By Keck Observatory
  • Why Do We Call It A “Hamburger” When It Doesn’t Contain Ham?
  • What Aristotle Got Wrong About The Octopus
  • The World’s Largest Island Is Shrinking And Shifting
  • Record-Breaking Marshmallow Planet – It’s A Cold, Peculiar World On A Very Slanted Orbit
  • Distinctive Rocks Might Be Remnants Of Earth Before The Collision That Made The Moon
  • Bright Northern Lights Across America Expected This Week As 3 Coronal Mass Ejections Fly Towards Earth
  • Brain Implant Enables Paralyzed Man To Feel And Use Objects Using Someone Else’s Hands
  • “This Is A Really Big Deal”: Brain Training Significantly Improves Key Neurochemical Levels In World First
  • “Wholly Unexpected”: First-Ever Fossil Paranthropus Hand Raises Questions About Earliest Tool Makers’ Identity
  • For Centuries, Nobody Knew Why Swiss Cheese Has Holes. Then, The Mystery Was Solved.
  • Scientists Studied The Infamous “Chicago Rat Hole” And They Have Some Bad News
  • Massive 166-Million-Year-Old Sauropod Footprints Become The Longest Dinosaur Trackway In Europe
  • Do Spiders Dream? “After Watching Hundreds Of Spiders, There Is No Doubt In My Mind”
  • IFLScience Meets: ESA Astronaut Rosemary Coogan On Astronaut Training And The Future Of Space Exploration
  • What’s So Weird About The Methuselah Star, The Oldest We’ve Found In The Universe?
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version