2023-11-05 07:00:05
NASA has captured a chilling image from space: a rock formation taking on the strange appearance of a skull at the heart of a volcanic peak in Chad.
NASA shared an astronaut photo showing a skull-shaped formation, composed of natron, cinder cones and shadows, lurking in a large caldera in the desert (The word desert today refers to a barren area or not very conducive to…) of the Sahara.
Crédit: NASA Earth Observatory
On February 12, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) captured this representation while flying over the massif. be used as 🙂 of Tibesti, which stretches in the heart of the Sahara desert, between Chad and Libya. The image was released on October 31 by NASA’s Earth Observatory.
On the ground of the “Trou au Natron” caldera, also called “Doon Orei”, this optical illusion materializes on a crater (For the crater of volcanic origin, see Volcanic crater For the crater of volcanic origin… ) volcanic nearly 1000 meters in diameter (In a circle or a sphere, the diameter is a line segment passing through the center…), remnant of a colossal eruption that occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago . The whiteness of the part representing the mouth, the nose and the left cheek comes from natron, a natural saline compound. The areas evoking the orbits and nostrils are scoria cones, conical hills formed around volcanic conduits which rise above above the rest of the caldera. The shadow (A shadow is a dark area created by the interposition of an opaque object (or only…) projected by the high rim of the crater accentuates the sinister appearance of the “face”.
This photo taken from inside the caldera shows the natron, a cinder cone, and the caldera rim, which combine to produce the illusion of a skull when viewed from above.
Credit: Wikimedia/Alexios Niarchos
The Trou au Natron area is devoid of life today, but researchers believe it was once home to a thriving lake until around 14,000 BCE. In the 1960s, fossils of marine molluscs and plankton were discovered beneath the natron-covered surface of the trench. More recently, in 2015, an expedition unearthed algae fossils dating back 120,000 years.
Trou au Natron is one of the most recent volcanic features in the Tibesti massif, the surrounding volcanoes are probably much older. This isn’t the first time an Earth feature has taken on a skull-like appearance from space. In 2016, a satellite image of a hurricane also captured the popular imagination with its eerie resemblance to a face.
This surreal landscape is a fascinating reminder of nature’s ability to sculpt shapes that spark our imagination, while offering us a glimpse into the geological history of our planet (A planet is a celestial body orbiting the Sun or another star…).
Pareidolia at work
Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon: the human mind perceives a vague or random, often visual stimulus. , as being significant. The most common cases of pareidolia occur when we recognize faces in inanimate objects or natural patterns, such as clouds, rock formations, or even the marbling of a slice of bread.
This tendency to find familiar patterns is rooted in our cognitive processes, being a subfunction of our ability to quickly recognize faces, which was vitally important for the survival of our ancestors. Although it can sometimes lead to fanciful or artistic interpretations, pareidolia mainly illustrates the way in which our brain tries to make sense of the environment (The environment is everything that surrounds us. It is the set of natural elements and…) that surrounds us.
1699174227
#huge #onekilometer #skull #captured #Earth #space