Members of the Himba tribe in Namibia have told for generations how a dragon’s powerful exhalation left marks in the earth.

No vegetation grew in those semi-circular marks anymore. Only bare earth remained, surrounded by grass common that occurs in the arid terrain of southeastern Africa.

In the 1970s the ecologist did Ken Tinley He concluded that these areas of land resembled the famous mushroom rings found in Europe and gave them a name “fairytale circles”.

According to Tinley, they may be due to the presence of termites.

But to this day these land formations they remain a mystery. Scientists have debated its cause for years but have not yet reached an agreement.

Now, new research has added another component to the discussion: there aren’t just fairy circles in Southwest Africa or Northwest Australia, as previously thought.

“We found the dry areas of the world from space using a model based on artificial intelligence hundreds of places with vegetation patterns similar to fairy circles never described before,” Spanish scientist Emilio Guirado explains to BBC Mundo.

The new research found fairytale circles outside Nambia, in the Sahel, Western Sahara and in the Horn of Africa. E. GUIRADO AND OTHERS

The researcher from the University of Alicante (Spain) led a study that showed that at least fairy circles are present 15 countries from three continents.

Although their research did not focus on discovering the origins of these formations, the data provided provides information that may help find the answer.

A debate lasting years

Fairy circles have been studied in two regions: South West Africa and North West Australia. E. GUIRADO AND OTHERS

Despite their name, fairy circles are usually formations hexagonal on the ground in which no vegetation grows there in its interior, but in all or a large part of its environment.

After Tinley’s research in the 1970s, scholarly discussion of the origins of fairy circles has evolved toward two main theories.

One was raised in 2013 by the German biologist Norbert Jurgenswho, after ten years of research, concluded that the formation of fairy circles is caused by the sand termites.

According to Jürgens, these insects eat the roots of the vegetation that starts to grow after the rain, leaving water accumulations in the subsoil and allowing them to survive.

“Termites are social insects that control their territory, where they have water and food, and the colonies defend their territory against their neighbors, sometimes very aggressively,” Jürgens explained to BBC Mundo in 2016.

The German biologist said that it is a “competition system between colonies”, a theory of which he is “completely certain” and which, he assured, has been confirmed by many of his colleagues.

Almost parallel to this is the German ecologist Stephen Getzin and the Israeli physicist Ehud Meron came together to investigate the fairy circles of Australia and proposed that their formation is explained by the self-organization theory.

Fairy circles were seen by the Himba natives long before scientists documented them. GETTY IMAGES

Nature, Meron explained to BBC Mundo after the study’s publication in 2016: deals with water scarcity due to such a phenomenon: “By organizing itself in circles, the surrounding vegetation benefits from an additional water source, as rain finds its way into the open spaces of the site, via various water transport mechanisms.”

“In Australia this mechanism involves the flow of water over land, while in Namibia it involves the distribution of stored water,” he said.

Getzin and Meron rejected Jürgens’ theory and stated that there were no termites in the fairy circles they studied in northwestern Australia.

In this regard, Jürgens said that his colleagues had not dug far enough to find them.

What does the new research say?

The research by Emilio Guirado’s team went beyond finding a reason for fairy circles an atlas of where these formations are located.

The scientist explained that they used two models of artificial intelligence with which they found hundreds of places with fairy circles in arid areas of the world – which represent 41% of the earth’s surface.

Fairy circles were detected in 15 countries on three continents. E. GUIRADO AND OTHERS

They analyzed some ‘predictors’, such as climate, soil and environmental factors, and they discovered that in those places where these variables are stable, fairy circles exist. Especially if there is sandy soil.

“We analyzed hundreds of thousands of images to discover hundreds of vegetation patterns, just like fairy circles in arid areas of the world. This process took just over a month on a supercomputer with 4 graphics processing units (GPU),” Guirado explains.

They searched with the help of two artificial intelligence models 600,000 satellite images from world mapping services, such as Google Earth, Bing Maps or Mapbox, to find the highest resolution snapshots of the terrain.

The research located one of the largest concentrations of fairy tale circles in Australia. E. GUIRADO AND OTHERS

This helped to get a clearer picture of those barren points on Earth where fairy circles are present.

The result was that they found 263 points on the planet where there are fairy circles, located in 15 countries from Africa, Asia and Oceania.

The regions where they were discovered include the Sahel, Western Sahara, the Horn of Africa, Madagascar, Southwest Asia and Central Australia.

When asked whether his research offers any explanation for the origin of these patterns, the Spanish scientist says it remains an unknown and does not rule out or support the hypotheses raised.

But clearly this is a phenomenon of arid areas, so outside of that it would be almost impossible to see them: “In theory, the circles would close in places where more rain falls,” says Guirado. (JO)

Until now, fairy circles were not known in Asia. E. GUIRADO AND OTHERS