Halloween may be over, but high in the desolate heart of the Sahara Desert, nature has provided us with one last naturally occurring spook in the form of an eerie, almost skull-like face staring up from a massive volcanic crater.
The Trou au Natron is a volcanic mountain in Chad. The locals call it Doon Orei, which translates to “big hole,” proving that a lack of creativity in naming things is a trait shared by many cultures. It’s 3300 feet wide, and its volcanic pit was carved out by a massive eruption hundreds of thousands of years ago.
When you see it from the ground, there isn’t anything particularly remarkable about it. But when viewed through satellite imagery, its creepiness is revealed: a white face with dark eyes that looks like it’s giving the earth a ghostly visage.
It’s not the work of an ancient artist or alien architect. It’s a natural geological formation that just so happens to be tailor-made for spooking NASA researchers viewing it through satellite imagery.
There’s a name for spotting faces and things where there are no faces. It’s called pareidolia. If you’re seeing Jesus Christ in a slice of toast, it’s probably less of a religious experience and more pareidolia, just your brain seeing something vaguely human and familiar in a random pattern. Our neurons can’t help but connect those dots.
The Trou au Natron’s “eyes” and “nose” are actually cinder cones, piles of rock and ash built up around vents from ancient eruptions. The ghostly white “skin” is a crust of natron, a natural mix of salts created by the “soda lake” that once filled the caldera. Sorry for the definitions inside of definitions, but a soda lake, otherwise known as an alkaline lake, is one where the pH value is intensely basic, meaning it has a pH value of somewhere between nine and 12. In other words, it’s extremely salty, hence the white color. If you’ve ever seen that hazy residue left behind on a pot after you have made a heavily salted pot of pasta, you get the idea.
The crater sits in one of the most remote and least studied regions on the planet. Scientists only started poking around there in the 1960s, and they think the caldera once held a glacial lake about 14,000 years ago. Today, it’s dry and cracked; gleaming white, like the bleached skull of some long-dead ancient beast.
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