The Fairy Circles of the Namib Desert (Desert Week 2012)
The Namib Desert is not only the oldest desert in the world, but it has its own shipwrecks, 900-year-old tree “skeletons”, and some of the highest sand dunes in the world. However we covered all those things in our 2008 article on the Namib Desert, and instead we’re now revisiting the area to discover the unexplained natural phenomenon known as The Fairy Circles. Covering a huge swathe of sparse grassland on the eastern fringes of the Namib Desert are tens of thousands of completely barren circular indentations in the sand, many of which are surrounded by a ring…