Sometimes the best art is the most mysterious thing on Earth. However, what is if Geology hides it?
People looking for strange and mysterious objects or formations always end up with discoveries in geology. From the water covering the Earth to the moon orbiting it, many bizarre things are just sitting there, waiting for humans to see them.
In geology, we can encounter many bizarre mysteries that can make our minds puzzled. For example, some objects or formations on Earth’s surface seem normal, but looking at how they are created can make them complicated and unexplainable.
Our world is home to strange unexplained mysteries and phenomena. However, some of them are hidden by geology. Now, it’s time to have a glimpse of them.
1) Lineaments
A lineament may be a strange mystery, but it is still breathtaking to see. It refers to a linear feature on a scale, including scarring or microscopic imagery. It can potentially cause a lot of things, such as island arcs, faults, or anything that causes stresses, scrapes, stretching, or cracks.
Scientists are constantly working to find a set of lineaments to unknot the geologic history. However, it remains challenging due to the ever-shifting Earth crust. So far, lineaments occupy a place somewhere between pareidolia and numerology.
2) Barrier Islands
People living on the East Coast usually see offshore islands. These islands are effective at protecting the coast from disasters like storm damage.
However, many people are still confused whether they are the overgrown bar or spit extensions fed by longshore drift or remnants of stranded coastline of berms, storm ridges, and dunes combined with rising sea levels that flood to build lagoons necessary for separating the mainland from the islands. In some instances, people believe that the offshore islands combine the two with a stranded coast that provides a foundation for a growing island.
3) Drumlins
When it comes to easy to identify landforms, drumlins fall into this category. However, their formation is still an unexplained phenomenon. They are teardrop-shaped hills that often occur in clusters. Researchers argue about whether they are formed by deposits or erosion.
Some people believe that drumlins can be deposited goop that infills cavities on the glacier’s underside, a bit squishier saturated sediments that were molded by an overlaying glacier, or subglacial materials carved by the meltwater.
During the last Ice Age, many drumlins were formed. Today, the available examples are skimpier. As a result, we have little data and limited observations that might help solve the competing theories.
4) Bornhardt
As spherical sheets shed off uplifted rocks, Bornhardt was formed. These large circular domes could be created through a multi-stage stripping and weathering loose rocks or by long-distance scarp retreat in a piecemeal landslides series.
However, their ability to shed rocks in sheets presents another question. Many people wonder if the weakened joints are formed by rock expanding after unloading the overlaying materials or under compression from squeezing while being buried.
5) Mima Mounds
Known as prairie pimples, Mima mounds are huge fields of gravelly oval hills. They are thirty centimeters to three meters tall. It takes about 500-700 years to form the hills and survive for thousands of years. However, they remain one of the unexplained events because no one has ever seen them form.
Many people also speculate that Mima mounds may be produced by swelling and shrinking clays created by seismic shaking during earthquakes or vegetated interior dunes. Yet, despite the countless array of theories, we still have never caught how these hills are built.
6) Pediments
Pediments are formed along the mountain ranges found in arid environments. These gently sloping bedrock surfaces are compromised with temporary sediment veneers. They are not smothered by the sediments’ deep aprons from debris flows. Since they are very shallow, they appear nearly flat under deposits dancing all over the bare rock.
Like other unexplained mysteries and events, many theories suggest how they are formed. The main theories include:
- River channels erode sideways once being downcast;
- Slope retreat and a bedrock bench’s exposure;
- Subsurface weathering leading to shedding of a pediment in sheets;
- Sheet-flooding throughout the surface;
- Rill-wash from channels with tight spaces.
However, every theory of pediments origin comes with flaws. So, mystery still surrounds pediments.
7) Feathered Dunes
There “feathering” ends of the feathered dunes make them mysterious yet gorgeous. These long, thin dunes tend to be so strange because we cannot reliably determine them. Theoretically, these dune formations refer to the transitional dune between the linear dunes. Prevailing winds form them from a single direction and star dunes with frequent wind direction shifting.
However, there is a problem here. The single example available was reclassified as something unique where the shape is attributed to the various mineral density and composition sediments and not wind regimes.
In other words, we have a theory for the feathered dunes that make them logically exist, but we have no examples of where they are on Earth or even other planets. Not only that, we know that each aeolian feature is between ten centimeters and ten meters in scale, and they rely on wind-blown sand streamers. So, getting reliable data by tracking sand streamer thwarts is even challenging.
Final Words
Some objects and landforms are as common as others, but how they are created makes them mysterious. We have successfully unveiled one mystery in some instances, but it only makes another mystery pop up.
No matter how we look at it, between the odd objects and weird landforms elsewhere around our planet, we will not run out of strange and mysterious events to research any time soon.
People’s curiosity about these things and events makes them more eager to discover more and find the answers that would satisfy that curiosity. So, it’s no surprise to see more mysterious phenomena even if we are clueless about their existence or how they are formed. If we remain curious, the time will come that we will find the answers.
