Welcome to the second annual GSS Desert Week! In time-honoured tradition, we’ll mostly be posting about deserts. For about a week!

Even by Saharan standards, the Ténéré region of northern Niger is pretty desolate: a vast sea of sand, broken only by the occasional rocky outcrop, where barely an inch of rain falls each year. So it’s something of a surprise to see a huge picture of a DC-10 among the dunes.

The story behind this striking image is a tragic one: it is a memorial to UTA Flight 772, which was blown up by a suitcase bomb in the skies above this spot in 1989, killing 170 people¹. An investigation concluded that Libyan terrorists were to blame for the explosion, which occurred 46 minutes after the aircraft took off from N’Djamena International Airport in Chad, en route to Paris. (The flight had originated from Brazzaville, the capital city of Congo.)

The memorial was created in 2007, to mark the 18th anniversary of the disaster, by Les Familles de l’Attentat du DC-10 d’UTA, an association of the victims’ families. Financed by a compensation fund paid to the victims by the Libyan government, it was constructed by 100 people working largely by hand under the desert sun.

The life-size silhouette of the aircraft lies inside a circle more than 200ft in diameter, created using dark stones set into the sand. Surrounding this circle are 170 broken mirrors, representing those who died, and arrows marking the points of the compass. At the northern point, part of the right wing of the DC-10 has been erected as a monument, with a plaque commemorating the victims.

The association’s website (in French) includes a moving video of the crash site – still littered with perfectly preserved debris – and numerous photographs of the construction of the memorial. (These are large PDF files, but are well worth downloading as they give an idea of the stark beauty of the region as well as the impressive size of the memorial.)

Thanks to Tom Van Steen.

The Vitruvian Man (Wikipedia) was drawn around 1487 by Leonardo Da Vinci, and has since become not only the most famous of Da Vinci’s works, but also one of the most famous images ever created. The drawing depicts a male nude in two superimposed positions within a square and a circle – the archetypal ‘perfect man’. Da Vinci was a talented anatomical artist, and was apparently rather partial to regularly cutting up corpses to help hone his skills.

In fact the Vitruvian Man is more than just a pretty picture – it’s also an extremely clever mathematical triumph, as it correctly relates the man’s proportions to historic measurements, such as the foot (six of which add up to his height), the cubit, hand and fathom. The complexity of the design will forever ensure that no overly-ambitious artist attempts to re-create it on Google Earth using the medium of “crop maze”.

Oh. Damn.

To give them their due credit, the people responsible for this German crop maze have done a pretty amazeing job – although, putting my ruler and pedantry skills into action showed that the “square” is more like 80 x 83m… and the circle is a bit wobbly compared to the original… but the positioning of the navel exactly in the centre is impressive!

This is actually the 2001 version of the town’s annual hemp labyrinth tradition, which in the past has seen a particularly spectacular map of Europe, a portrait of Albert Einstein and a tribute to the 2004 Athens Olympics. You can see aerial photos of them all at the maze’s website.

Thanks to godlike.

It’s hard not to see the rear of a naked woman in the shapes made by this field in Sicily, Italy.

As you can see though, the title of this post refers not to the fact that she’s half naked (as she clearly has no clothes on at all), but rather that she’s only half a woman – as she seems to be missing all her limbs. And her head.¹

Thanks to Santi.

We get lots of submissions from people who claim to be able to see faces, animals or even aliens in the natural landscapes of Google Earth, but often the images are so open to interpretation that we unfortunately can’t see what it is that our readers are seeing.

On the other hand, when we’re sent something that’s clearly recognisable, in virtually every case the sight has been man made. So when we received this submission that bears an undeniable¹ resemblance to the profile of a face in a field in Ohio, we initially assumed this was the work of a particularly adventurous crop-circle artist.

On closer inspection however, this face might not be so obviously man-made. Are the “eyes” actually islands of trees? Is the “mouth” just a naturally darker patch of ground? And yet, the “chin” must surely have been created by a trail left by a tractor, right?

So whilst it’s possible that a farmer was getting creative, we think the most likely explanation is that this is just a particularly freaky combination of natural formation and man’s influence, which is playing on our natural predilection to assign meaning wherever we look.

Still, it does look an awful lot like a face.

Thanks to Jennifer.

Back in 2005 we had tons of fun trying to work out whose face could be seen in this Peruvian sand dune.

So who wants to hazard a guess as to who some amateur crop-circle makers were trying to draw, when they created this very suspicious-looking face in a field in Germany?

Thanks to Marius.