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“Mysterious” Egyptian Sand Spiral Seen on Google Maps – Like Crop Circles? Ten Strangest Sights on Google Earth
Monday, February 24, 2014 21:54
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To some viewers, it looks like a landing strip for extra-terrestrial spacecraft — or perhaps the portal to a parallel universe, if not an ancient monument to a benevolent deity who had a keen eye for design and symmetry.
But what people are actually seeing in the desolate reaches of the Egyptian desert, just a short distance from the shores of the Red Sea, is in fact an environmental art installation. And it’s been baffling tourists and armchair travellers since it was constructed in March 1997.
Danae Stratou, Alexandra Stratou and Stella Constantinides worked as a team to design and build the enormous 1,076 square foot (100 square meters) piece of artwork — called Desert Breath — to celebrate ”the desert as a state of mind, a landscape of the mind,” as stated on the artists’ website. [10 Strangest Sights on Google Earth]
Constructed as two interlocking spirals — one with vertical cones, the other with conical depressions in the desert floor — Desert Breath was originally designed with a small lake at its centre, but recent images on Google Maps show that the lake has emptied.
The entire structure, in fact, is slowly disintegrating as the sand that forms the art piece slowly blows off its cone-shaped hills and fills in its depressions, making it “an instrument to measure the passage of time.”
http://www.livescience.com/43617-egypt-spiral-google-maps-desert-breath.html
