© discovery
Brilio.net/en - What would pop into your head if someone mentioned fairy circles? Tiny pixies with their delicate wings fluttering around circles of red, dotted mushrooms? Well, you might have seen too many fairytale movies.
But thats not completely wrong. Fairy circles, also known as a pixie ring or fairy ring, are circular barren patches of land, typically found in the grasslands of the western part of Southern Africa. They are most prolific in Namibia but are also present in Angola and South Africa.
But one of the natures enduring puzzle was also discovered recently in Western Australias Pilbara region (these ones are huge and without mushrooms), providing the new possibility to solving it.
The circles, which are regularly spaced patches of bare soil that form in uniform hexagonal patterns throughout arid grasslands, had until recently only been confirmed in Namibia in south-western Africa.
Image vianewscientist
But in 2014, fairy circle expert Dr. Stephan Getzin from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research was shocked by the presence of similar rings in vegetation, about 5 kilometers to the east to southeast of Newman in the Pilbara. The rings were discovered by Australian environmental scientist and study co-author, Dr. Bronwyn Bell.
Numbers of theories have been proposed over the years to explain how the mysterious patterns form in arid areas. Yet the latest research has indicated that scarce of available water drives plants to organize themselves in such formations.
Image via mashable
Dr. Todd Erickson, from the Restoration Seed Bank Initiative at the University of Western Australia said the strange dotted pattern was very clearly seen when flying into the small mining town.
From above, groups of fairy circles form repeating hexagonal formations, with six bare patches about four meters in diameter spaced about 10 meters away from each other around a central focal point to form the points of the hexagon.
Image viasciencenews
You dont see them from the ground, said Dr. Erickson, another study author who has been working in the Pilbara for the last eight years.
According to him, when youre standing inside a fairy circle, you wont see the next one 10 meters away. To find them, you need to spot them from the air.
People have known about (the circles) for years but no-one with the skills of Stephan has actually gone out there and actually mapped them from the landscape scale, he said.
Aerial photographs and spatial patterns of vegetation analysis revealed that Australian and African fairy circles are almost identical, despite being more than 10,000 kilometers apart. The result is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Source: Discovery News
(brl/red)
