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Richat Structure

The Eye of the Sahara and the Mirror of God: the Impressive Richat Structure

Inspire

The Richat Structure in the Sahara Desert looks quite astonishingly like the eye of the planet. It's a place where one could even catch a glimpse of divinity.

To say that the Earth is a living being permits us to imagine it with those organs that we find in other beings and, of course, to establish metaphors like, for instance, “the forests are the lungs of the planet.”

Perhaps less familiar is the case of a particular spot in the planet which we could consider its eye, an enormous, concentrically shaped natural structure that most amazingly gives out the appearance of a gigantic seeing organ ––one which is always awake to see what happens around it. The Richat Structure, also known as Eye of the Sahara, is set in the Sahara Desert, in Mauritania.

The terrestrial whirlpool is about 30 miles in diameter, and looks deep into a hypnotizing spiral made, some say, by the impact of a meteorite or even by the eruption of an ancient volcano. But whatever created it, the panoramic view is astounding enough to be dubbed the “Mirror of God”. A place where a hypothetical divinity peeps out every day so that, as in the famous poem by Oscar Wilde states, the planet can see its own beauty reflected.

Image credits:

1, 3: NASA

2. ATAMARI

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