The Richat Structure, also known as the Eye of the Sahara or blue eye of Africa, is a peculiar geological formation in the Sahara desert in Mauritania, a country in Northwest Africa.
For thousands of years, the vastness of the geological formation — which has a diameter of 50 kilometers (31 miles) — was not apparent to humans.
One reason this Eye of Africa remained undiscovered for so long is that it is located in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth: the Sahara Desert.
To see it, you have to hike through miles of extremely harsh desert climate, battling aridity, dehydration, and extreme heat.
The blue eye is even visible from space and is now a familiar landmark for astronauts gazing down from the planet, according to the European Space Agency.
The structure is made up of concentric circles of resistant quartzite rocks which form ridges and valleys of less-resistant rock, writes the ESA.
Initially, scientists interpreted the eye as an asteroid impact structure because of its high degree of circularity, and then as a structure formed by a volcanic eruption that also seems improbable because of the lack of a dome of igneous or volcanic rock.
It is also argued to be a highly symmetrical and deeply eroded geologic dome that collapsed.
So it is now thought by many to have been caused by uplifted rock sculpted by erosion.
But the fact that the “rings”, are equidistant to the centre and that the Richat Structure is nearly circular remains a mystery.
The formation is surrounded by a sea of dunes in the Western Sahara in Mauritania. Its highest peak stands some 485 meters above sea level.
And new questions arise. Some people are amazed by the resemblance of this structure with the representation we have of Atlantis by Plato. According to Plato, the island was circular, divided into concentric circles of land and water:
“There were 2 of land and 3 of water… Atlantis when sunk by the earthquake became an impossible barrier of mud to voyagers sailing from hence to any part of the ocean…”
And he spoke about a mount sheltering the city by North and “and encompassing a great plain of an oblong shape in the south “…etc…
The amusing part is that the area is extraordinarily difficult to find. Being that the large concentric circles don’t look like much from the ground, you would likely drive over the area without even realizing that you’ve done so.
Geologists and archaeologists after so much researches for years have concluded that the Richat Structure or the Eye of Africa, had no real human significance.
It wasn’t formed at a time when humans existed, and the earliest evidence of humans in the area doesn’t align with the supposed age of the Atlantean people.
What it does show, however, is an extremely interesting geologic feature that was carved over hundreds of millions of years.
After these processes took their toll on the geologic dome, it left the 30-mile Eye of Africa that we see from higher altitudes today. It will continue to inspire minds everywhere.
