Visiting the Mysterious Fairy Circles of the Namib Desert

One evening earlier this spring, German naturalist Norbert Jürgens strayed from his expedition in the Namib Desert. He walked away from his campsite beside Leopard Rock, a huge pile of schist slabs stacked like left-over roofing tiles, and into a vast plain ringed with red-burnished hills. He had 20 minutes of light left before sunset, and he intended to use them.

This next part may sound like a reenactment from a nature documentary, but trust me: This is how it went down.

Off by himself, Jürgens dropped down to his knees. He sank his well-tanned arms in the sand up to the elbows. As he rooted around, he told me later, he had a revelation.

At the time, I was watching from the top of Leopard Rock, which offered a bird’s-eye view of both Jürgens and his expedition’s quarry. Across the plain, seemingly stamped into its dry, stubbly grass, were circles of bare ground, each about the size of an aboveground pool. Jürgens, a professor at the University of Hamburg, was digging—and pondering—in one of these bare patches.

The patches are Namibia’s enigmatic fairy circles, and for decades they have drawn visitors, including our convoy, into the desert. In recent years, Jürgens and other researchers have argued bitterly over the how and why of fairy circles, disagreeing over data and theory in person and across the pages of the world’s preeminent journals.

This is more than an academic dispute over a tourist attraction, however. Fairy circles are a test case in the emerging field of biological-pattern analysis, where they may offer an encrypted message about the future of desert ecosystems—and the humans who hope to survive in them.

Fairy circles are found in parched, sandy soils on the Atlantic side of southern Africa, along a thin north-south strip that runs well over a thousand miles from South Africa’s Richtersveld mountains into southern Angola.

The smallest fairy circles are about five feet in diameter, and the further north you go, the bigger they get; the largest circles, in Angola, can sprawl across 130 feet. A single circle can persist for at least 75 years—maybe for centuries. Among their many peculiar qualities is a spooky low-level magnetism: A magnet dragged across the inside of a circle picks up far more soil than it does outside its boundary.

Since the 1970s, scientists have spitballed theories about the origin of fairy circles. The bare patches could be caused by chemical compounds emitted by , a toxic bush. Or they could be the feeding grounds of a ravenous termite called . Maybe they’re