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To some viewers , it looks like a landing place striptease for extraterrestrial spacecraft — or perhaps the portal to a parallel existence , if not an ancient monument to a charitable deity who had a keen eye for design and symmetry .
But what people are really seeing in the barren compass of the Egyptian desert , just a short distance from the shore of the Red Sea , is in fact an environmental art installation . And it ’s been baffling tourists and armchair traveller since it was construct in March 1997 .
Desert Breath, as seen on Google Maps.
Danae Stratou , Alexandra Stratou and Stella Constantinides worked as a squad to plan and build up the enormous 1 million straight foot ( 100,000 straight meters ) slice of artwork — called Desert Breath — to celebrate"the desert as a DoS of nous , a landscape of the mind , " as stated on theartists ' web site . [ See Photos of the sensational ' Desert Breath ' helix ]
Constructed as two interlocking spirals — one with vertical cones , the other with conical Great Depression in the desert floor — Desert Breath was primitively designed with a minor lake at its center , but late images on Google Maps show that the lake has emptied .
The intact social organization , in fact , is lento disintegrating as the gumption that forms the art bit slowly blows off its cone - shaped hills and fill in its depressions , build it " an instrument to measure the passage of time . "
The artistic creation piece fall in other mysterious images and environmental artworks that entrance looker on Google Earth , Google Maps and other on-line chopine . For illustration , the twist - blown steppes of Kazakhstan are domicile to alarge pentagrametched into the Earth ’s surface on the shores of a desolate lake .
The five - pointed figure bedevil viewers ' imaginativeness until it was revealed to be the outline of the roadstead in a Soviet - era Mungo Park . The maven was a democratic symbol in the U.S.S.R. , and Kazakhstan was part of the former Soviet Union until that union dissolved in 1991 .
And engrave onto the desert floor of New Mexico are two large diamonds surrounded by a span of overlapping circles . This is reportedly the site of a concealed trap belonging to theChurch of Scientology , concord to the author of a book on the religious grouping .
The Godhead of Desert Breath have no political or cult - like aspiration , however : " Located … at the percentage point where the immensity of the sea meet the immensity of the desert , the work functions on two different levels in terminal figure of viewpoint : from above as a visual persona , and from the ground , walk the spiral nerve pathway , a forcible experience . "
