These mysterious spots of barren soil have fascinated scientists for years. Now evidence of their existence beyond two known locations is stirring up a fresh round of contention
In the remote grasslands of southwestern Africa’s Namib Desert and the Pilbara region of Australia some 6,000 miles away, large, barren circles crowd the landscape, like holes stamped out by a cookie cutter in a sheet of dough. The peculiar pockmarks, called “fairy circles,” were thought to exist exclusively in those two arid stretches.
Several explanations offered in the past—such as toxins from the leaves of plants in the genus Euphorbia or gaseous emissions from below the ground—have fallen out of favor. Only two theories seem to persist in the ongoing debate: The first, proposed by ecologist Norbert Jürgens, holds that competing colonies of underground sand termites left the circular stamps.
One of these characteristics is a spatially periodic pattern: the tendency of fairy circles to exist in a gridlike formation with very little variation in the distances between them, Getzin says. His previous research had posited that fairy circles are arranged in a hexagonal formation in which one circle is a focal point, positioned in the center of six others and at approximately the same distance from each.
Michael Cramer, an ecologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, who researches spatial patterns in ecosystems and also was not involved in the new research, says its application of AI technology to this field is a major step forward. He also questions some of the results, however. In particular, he says, a few of the patterns are too small—just six feet across—compared with known fairy circles, which tend to span about seven to 39 feet across.
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