NewStats: 3,261,373 , 8,173,824 topics. Date: Thursday, 29 May 2025 at 03:51 AM 71t14

Enormous desert structure built by insects is 4,000 years old and can be seen from space

On the scrub‑covered plains of northeastern Brazil, millions of brown cones rise just high enough to catch the late‑day sun. They look like random piles left by ing farmers and, until recently, they fooled researchers too.

Satellite images finally revealed their true extent: an earthen metropolis spread over roughly 88,000 square miles – about the size of Great Britain – and built grain by grain by termites no longer than a fingernail.

Most ecosystems show traces of the animals that shape them, yet few match this scale. The Syntermes dirus termites have pushed more than 2.4 cubic miles of soil to the surface, assembling around 200 million mounds without a single blueprint.

Only when scientists from the University of Salford and the Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana (UEFS) began pairing drone flights with ground surveys did the pattern emerge.

Tiny, silent architects of the caatinga
The caatinga – a seasonally dry forest shot through with thorny shrubs – offers slim pickings.

Rain arrives in bursts, leaves fall fast, and food appears in scattered pockets. That scarcity has pushed S. dirus to become subterranean engineers.

While foraging, they carve tunnels just beneath the surface, shoving spoil upward through temporary shafts. Each shaft becomes a cone about 8.2 feet high and 29.5 feet wide; over time those cones harden into permanent landmarks.

Unlike the tower‑like nests seen in Africa or Australia, these Brazilian mounds hold no royal chamber or nursery.

They are solid waste dumps – the visible residue of an underground traffic system optimized for hauling leaf litter home.

The termites stay hidden by day, sealing narrow access tubes until darkness brings cooler air and fewer predators.

Very, very old termite mounds
To work out when the first heaps appeared, researchers drilled cores from mound centers and dated mineral grains with optically stimulated luminescence.

Some cones formed 3,820 years ago; others are as ‘young’ as 690 years old. That makes them among the oldest termite structures on Earth, older than many stone monuments humans celebrate.

Every termite mound cone holds roughly 65 cubic yards of packed clay. Multiply that by 200 million, and the displaced soil rivals about 4,000 Great Pyramids of Giza – a statistic the team highlighted to put insect power in perspective.

Field crews could visit only a fraction of the cones, so the study turned to a modeling tool called MAXENT. By feeding confirmed mound locations into the algorithm, the scientists projected where similar terrain likely hosts more cones.

Follow‑up hikes backed the prediction: the grid stretches for hundreds of miles, yet human activity barely nicks it because the acidic clay is poor farmland.

Decoding the perfect spacing
Stand atop one termite mound, and another sits about 65 feet away in any direction – a pattern called ‘over‑dispersed’.

To discover whether rival colonies enforced such order, the team introduced termites from neighboring heaps to one another.

No hostility surfaced unless the insects came from sites roughly 31 miles apart, implying that spacing is not a product of territorial squabbles.

Over centuries, the termites created a lattice with an average density of 4,660 mounds per square mile. Chemical signals probably keep the lattice intact; pheromone trails guide workers through labyrinthine tunnels to food, to waste cones, and back again without traffic jams.

Life underground in a termite mound
Beneath each cone lies a central artery that branches like a tree root. The network lets colonies reach new leaf drops without surfacing midday in brutal heat.

By night, workers nibble dry leaves, ferry them below, and seal the entrance behind them. The cones themselves do nothing more than hold discarded clay, yet they mark the tunnel map for generations.

Parallels pop up across harsh landscapes. Naked mole‑rats in East Africa build similar subterranean webs to chase tubers.

North American gophers leave spoil piles comparable in form, though smaller in scale. In every case, sparse resources push small creatures to redesign the very ground they inhabit.

Understanding termites – the basics
Termites might be tiny, but they play a massive role in shaping ecosystems. These insects live in highly organized colonies, sometimes numbering in the millions, and they divide their tasks among workers, soldiers, and queens.

You’ll often find them in warm, humid environments where they chew through wood, dead plants, and even dung.

While we tend to associate termites with destruction – especially when they invade homes – they actually help recycle nutrients back into the soil, keeping forests and grasslands healthy.

What’s fascinating is how they build and communicate. Termites use chemical signals to coordinate everything, from feeding to defending their nest.

Some species even construct towering mounds that regulate temperature and humidity through intricate tunnel systems – essentially natural air-conditioning.

So yes, while they might give homeowners nightmares, termites are more than just pests. They’re nature’s quiet architects, shaping the world one bite at a time.

Lessons from a living city
The Brazilian grid shows that big construction does not require big bodies or even central planning.

Simple rules – dig, dump, move on – run through countless termite lifetimes and shape an entire biome. When food is scattered and rain unreliable, efficiency wins.

The cones stand as silent mile‑markers of that principle, reminding visitors that the world’s grandest civil engineers sometimes weigh less than a paperclip.

https://www.earth.com/news/enormous-desert-structure-termite-mound-built-by-insects-can-be-seen-from-space/

Wow

4000 years ko 4000minute niii
Science too dey exaggerate........

Fascinating... Endtime insects

K

Lori iro.,,,with drone, space can be 1 km above

Who do the maths??

Magnificent

Great!

Looks irritating

As a scientist, it is often our duty not to flatter, but to observe objectively and sometimes uncomfortably.
Strip away our technology, our clothes, our tools and what are we? Naked, soft-skinned primates with limited endurance, poor night vision, no natural camouflage, no fangs, no claws.
We are born nearly helpless, requiring years of care before we can function independently. Contrast this with other species each finely tuned by evolution to thrive within Earth’s challenges.

Consider the camel, nature’s desert engineer.
With the ability to conserve water, tolerate extreme temperatures and traverse scorching dunes with ease, it scoffs at the very environments that would kill a human in hours.

Them go just dey dish out figures wey them no fit explain

No be only 4,000

4000 years

Quite huge

Morbeta11:

https://www.earth.com/news/enormous-desert-structure-termite-mound-built-by-insects-can-be-seen-from-space/

Who calculated the 4000 years?

oluseyiforjesus:
4000 years ko 4000minute niii
Science too dey exaggerate........

Have you heard of Carbon Dating before?

Dead termites or other organisms inside the mound can be used to achieve that.

Alternatively, Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) Dating is the best suited for this purpose

nature is cool

Make I enter them

oluseyiforjesus:
4000 years ko 4000minute niii
Science too dey exaggerate........

Ayomitide77:
4000 years

Kennikeddo:
No be only 4,000

Kingv:

Have you heard of carbon dating before?

I am here to teach people new things.
We learn everyday.

Here is for the people doubting the number of years.
I hope they learn something new today.

Radiocarbon dating, also known as carbon-14 dating, is a scientific method for determining the age of organic materials up to 60,000 years old.
It measures the amount of carbon-14, a radioactive isotope of carbon, remaining in a sample.
Carbon-14 is heavier and less stable than the most common carbon form, and decays over thousands of years with a half-life of 5,730 years.

Science that produced fans, radio, TV, computer, cure for diseases, great architectural structures, rockets, aeroplane, microscope, surgical operations etc.

Religion that provides noise, noise, noise and noise again using scientific inventions to propagate their noises.

Let them hear that one guy called Jesus died on one cross, they will believe. That a donkey spoke, they will believe. That a God has a son and he died for them, they will believe. That their god died and rose, they will believe. That Satan is in Mecca to be stoned, they will believe. But when same science tells them anything incredible, they will put on their thinking cap and argue it.

It's like religion has a way of shutting down a part of their brains. So they can't think logically to counter its lies. But science wakes up their brain so they can think logically only when science is involved. Chai.

Kingv:


Have you heard of carbon dating before?

And who is carbon dating? Hydrogen? Oga that dating can never be accurate

RISQUE:


Who calculated the 4000 years?

Calculatissorros.....

oluseyiforjesus:
4000 years ko 4000minute niii
Science too dey exaggerate........

Agbo jedi for you.

See everyone for up dey shout say na lie.... When some people said they invented the aeroplane and the news got to Africa, your forefathers laughed and said its a lie, humans can't fly.... Over 100 yrs later , some of u guys still doubt science...but believe in witchcraft

If they tell u people that there's an international space station orbiting the earth some of una go say na lie as well....

These people are just being stupid, there are many of these termiterium that are far older beyond 4,000years everywhere in Africa.

Sometimes, it is very difficult to believe scientists and their strange discoveries. This does not add up honestly...

Please come with your figures!

Same way they exaggerate that 60secs make 1 minute abi?

Science if factual bro, with proof!

oluseyiforjesus:
4000 years ko 4000minute niii
Science too dey exaggerate........