This Sahara Bullseye Isn’t a Crater



In the Sahara desert of Mauritania, a forty-kilometer ring of exposed rock forms an almost perfect bullseye — so symmetrical that early geologists were sure it had to be an impact crater, and astronauts still spot it by eye from orbit.

Field surveys since the 1960s never found the proof a real impact leaves behind: no shocked quartz, no melt rock, no shatter cones. A mineral once reported as shocked quartz turned out to be ordinary barite, misidentified. The structure is now understood as a Cretaceous-age dome pushed up by magma, then carved into rings by wind and water eroding its harder and softer rock layers at different rates — and exactly why the rings are so even is still being studied.

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3 Comments

  1. I don't think rising magma is the only cause. The structure is too circular and there are more than one. Four with one inside the other that I don't think they have found in another location on the planet. I don't know what it is, but science gets plenty wrong before they drunkenly stumble across the correct answer.

  2. What gets me is that the "obvious" explanation was the wrong one — a perfect circle looked man-made, but the actual proof was in what was missing: no shock scars in the rock at all.

    If a shape looks too neat to be natural, what would you check first before believing it was made by something intelligent?

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