Nature & Environment

Google Earth Reveals Mysterious Land Artwork in Egyptian Desert

Benita Matilda
First Posted: Feb 26, 2014 04:40 AM EST

The secret of the bizarre spiral pattern located in the Egyptian desert, which has amazed Google Earth users for years, has been finally revealed.

The Egyptian spiral located in the eastern Sahara desert in El Gouna, Egypt, was till date misinterpreted as a landing pad for the alien invaders or some ancient monument. But this mysterious spiral mound is an environmental art installation called Desert Breath, reports Live Science.

This enticing land art work called the Desert Breath was constructed by a team founded in 1995 by Danae Stratou, Alexandra Stratou and Stella Constantinides.  The construction of this land art work, which stretches across 100,000 square meters bordering the Red Sea, ended in March 1997. Since then this land art has perplexed several tourists.

This art showcases the 'desert as a state of mind, a landscape of mind,' say the artists on their website.

The spiral mounds are constructed as two intertwined spirals in which one is made of vertical cones and the other consists of conical depression on the surface, with a lake right at the center.  The construction of these mounds displaced nearly 8,000 cubic meters of sand.

But what is heartbreaking is that the recent Google image shows that the small lake at the center of the stunning land art is empty and the mounds are slowly withering and the sand from the vertical cones is slowly blowing off and settling in the conical depressions. It now serves as an instrument to measure the passage of time.

"Located between the sea and a body of mountains at the point where the immensity of the sea meets the immensity of the desert, the work functions on two different levels in terms of viewpoint: from above as a visual image, and from the ground, walking the spiral pathway, a physical experience," the team writes in a blog.

This is not the only strange mysterious image captured by Google Earth. The 12 strangest sites on Google Earth include a bizarre structure engraved into the Gobi desert, a pentagram in Kazakhstan, an undiscovered island the size of Manhattan and a red blood lake outside Sadr city.

To watch a video of the spiral mound Click Here.

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