10 Places On Google Maps Scientists Can't Explain

A mysterious giant crater in Siberia, an entire island that completely vanished, and massive ancient patterns so large they can only be seen from the sky, these are 10 places on Google Maps scientists can't explain. Somewhere in the middle of Siberia, buried deep in forest that basically nobody ever goes through, there's a giant limestone cone sticking up 130 feet out of the ground. Looks like a bird's nest, made of rock, with a smooth, rounded boulder sitting right in the middle of it. The Soviet geologist named Vadim Kolpakov found it in 1949, and scientists have been going back and forth about it ever since. The region has no volcanoes anywhere near it, so that's off the table. For a long time, people figured a meteorite must have hit the ground so hard it compressed the earth and sent it shooting back up, creating the shape. Reasonable theory, except every team that went out there and dug around found nothing, meaning no space rock fragments, no debris, none of the glassy, melted material that always shows up when a meteorite hits. What they did find was weird though. The trees surrounding the crater, at the time it formed somewhere between 300 and 500 years ago, went through a sudden growth surge. The same kind of thing happened to plants around Chernobyl after the disaster. So this started a bit of a legend. Stories started spreading that anyone who got too close got sick and died. People started wondering if a chunk of radioactive material was buried underneath it. Some people went further, saying an alien spacecraft with a nuclear engine crashed there and is still sitting under the dirt. If you pull up Google Maps and scroll across the Gobi Desert, at some point you'll come across a huge white grid cut directly into the dark desert floor. It's sharp. It's enormous. It stretches over a mile. It looks like something a machine would draw. When it first showed up in satellite images, people lost their minds online. Were these secret messages aimed at aliens, underground military bases with giant runways? Well, the official explanation is that it's a calibration target for spy satellites, which is still pretty cool. Basically, when a country launches a new camera into orbit, engineers need to know where the lenses are working correctly and whether the atmosphere is warping the images. So they build a huge, mathematically precise pattern on the ground, take a photo of it from space, and then measure how clearly the lines come out. If the image is blurry or distorted, they adjust the camera until it isn't. In 2007, a guy was poking around Google Earth looking for pyramids in Central Asia when he noticed strange shapes pressed into the grasslands of Kazakhstan. Since then, researchers have counted more than 260 of these things. The biggest one, called the Ostukansky Square, is a box made of 101 individual dirt mounds that stretches longer than several football fields end-to-end. Stand anywhere near them on foot, and you just have no idea. They're invisible from the ground, basically. You can only make them out from up in the air. When scientists tested the soil, they found out these things are old. And I mean really old. Some of them go back about 8,000 years. I mean, that's Stone Age territory, and that's a bit of a problem. People living here at the time were nomads. They didn't build permanent settlements. But building these shapes would have required moving thousands of tons of dirt, organizing large groups of people. And since the shapes only really make sense when viewed from above, it doesn't really make the whole thing feel worth it. In Western Sahara, there's a circular rock formation called the Richat structure that stretches 25 miles across. It's made of rings of stone, one inside the other, like a perfect bull's eye, sorta. It's so big, so obvious from above, that early astronauts used it as a reference point to figure out where they were while orbiting Earth. Because it's round, huge, the first scientists who saw it assumed it had to be a meteor crater. But when researchers got there and dug into the rock, again, they didn't find any physical evidence of a meteor impact. So a certain group of people went in a very different direction, specifically toward Atlantis. The argument goes like this. Ancient Greek philosopher Plato described Atlantis as this city built in alternating rings of land and water. The measurements he wrote down actually line up pretty well with the dimensions of the eye of Sahara. Of course, mainstream geologists don't go for that theory. Their explanation is that a massive blob of magma pushed up from deep inside the Earth about 100 million years ago. Over time, erosion wore away the softer rock on top and left the harder, circular layers exposed. In a very remote part of the Peruvian Amazon, there's a four-mile section of river that's constantly boiling. The water puts off so much steam you can see it in satellite images, this white haze sitting over the jungle. Indigenous people in the area had known about it for a long time and considered it sacred. For a long time, though, scientists said it couldn't exist. Their reasoning was that water doesn't boil in a river unless there's a volcano underneath it, and the nearest volcanic zone is more than 400 miles away from here. But in 2011, a geoscientist named Andres Ruzo went looking for it and found out it was completely real. The water temperature runs between 86 and 100 degrees Celsius. Anything small that falls in dies almost instantly. Ruzo actually watched as small animals like frogs slipped into the current, their eyes turned white on contact. What's actually happening is that rainwater falls on the Andes, seeps into cracks in the rock, and travels miles underground where the Earth's internal heat superheats it. Eventually, that water hits a fault line and gets forced back up to the surface at boiling temperature. It's basically the same as a volcanic hot spring, it's just without any volcano involved. In the Nevada desert, just outside the boundary of Area 51, there's a large triangle cut into the ground. UFO fanatics took one look at this location and they were like, landing pad? Alien signal? Remnants of some long-lost civilization? What it actually is goes back to the Cold War. The military was building spy planes, stealth aircraft, and the pilots flying those things at extreme altitude needed to test whether their radar and targeting systems were working. So they cut these big geometric shapes into the desert floor, flew over them, bounced radar signals off the ground to check their instruments. The dots inside the triangle are metal targets which show up clearly on a radar screen. The site hasn't been used in decades, it's just sitting out in the dirt, perfectly visible on satellite images. It certainly looks alien. All across the lava fields of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, there are thousands of stone structures built out of low rock walls. From above, they look like wagon wheels. Some of them stretch 230 feet across. The thing is, the rock they're built on is dark and uneven, so from the ground they just look like a bunch of stones. Bedouin people had been living and traveling through that land for generations without ever knowing the rocks formed any kind of pattern. It took airplane pilots flying over in the 1920s to finally see what was there. Scientists dated them to over 8,500 years old and nobody can figure out why they were made. The people who built them had no way to ever see what they were building. Some of the spokes of the wheels, for lack of a better term, line up with the sunrise on the winter solstice. So maybe they were tracking the calendar somehow, but spending months hauling heavy volcanic rock to build thousands of giant shapes you can only see from the sky, you know, with no aircraft, no satellites, none of that stuff, that part still doesn't have a solid answer. In 1998, a charter pilot was flying over the outback in South Australia when he noticed something in the sand below. It was a carving in the shape of a man with what looked like a throwing stick in his hand. It's one of the biggest pieces of art ever made anywhere on earth. It looked like some kind of ancient piece, but no. The day before, it wasn't there, but nobody claimed they made it. And when investigators went out to the site, they found no tracks or footprints leading in or away from it. Whatever equipment was used to carve those lines got in and out without leaving a single trace. Lines were cut deep into hard soil with heavy machinery, most likely. Experts looked at the proportions of the figure and said whoever drew it had to have used military-grade GPS to keep the human anatomy accurate at that scale. Consumer GPS in 1998, it wasn't even close to being able to do that. And fax machines started showing up at news stations, anonymous, written in American spelling, with references to a U.S. military base called Woomera that operates nearby. That was enough to get people theorizing that maybe American soldiers made it. As for why, who knows? At one point, if you looked at Sidir City on Google Maps and zoomed in the outskirts, there was a pond that was bright red. And I mean like beet red, sitting right next to other ponds that looked completely normal. The image spread online and people's explanations ranged from religious end times theories to slaughterhouses illegally dumping animal waste into the water. That sounds pretty likely. Nobody ever actually tested it though. The area was a bit too politically complicated for scientists to just get in and take samples. By the time the situation had settled down enough to even consider sending anyone in, Google had already refreshed the satellite image and the lake was now back to normal. So scientists were left with two possibilities. No evidence for either though. One is that the water had a sudden massive bloom, a microorganism that turns red when the water gets salty hot enough. The other is that a factory nearby dumped red dye or chemical waste. Both make sense, but without any actual water samples, there's no way to tell for sure. And that has been the video for today. I'll catch you, yes you specifically, in the next one.