NASA Astronaut Spots ‘Ghoulish White Skull’ in Sahara Desert — Experts Reveal What It Really Is
On February 12, 2023, a NASA astronaut from the Expedition 68 crew was gazing outside their spaceship window, with a Nikon D5 digital camera tucked within their hands. As they peered through the camera, a striking tremor ran through their spine, evoking jitters. In the middle of the Sahara Desert, a gigantic white face of a ghoul was staring back at them, its creepy eye sockets popping out from the dry, arid stretch of the desert, evoking fright. The astronaut, likely very nervous and creeped out, snapped the ghoul’s face in an image and quickly sent it to the NASA scientists at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
A case of geological palimpsest
The spine-chilling episode turned into a frolicking comedy flick when the scientists realized that the ghoul’s face was actually a deception cast by the white sands of the Sahara, the volcanic rocks, and the soda lake, a case of what they call “geological palimpsest.”
“Geological palimpsest,” according to Open Geology, refers to “something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.” In the same way as ancient scribes used sharp blades to scrape away dried ink from sheets of parchment paper, this patch of Sahara is a time capsule layered with millions of years of historical lettering, inked by the shifting sands, the changing climates, the fluctuating geology and chemistry, among other things. The white sands of the desert, therefore, are like memorykeepers that store within them the memories of all the times gone by.
From the @Space_Station, the volcanic pit and soda lake Trou au Natron in northern Chad looks like it’s staring back at you! The “face” is formed from past volcanic eruptions and salt deposits of present-day hot springs. #NASAHalloween https://t.co/4tzjUbylGY
— NASA Earth (@NASAEarth) October 31, 2023
Archive of geological memories
Sahara, the “hottest and one of the most inhospitable deserts on the planet,” is an archive of these geological memories, accumulated over time. When winds howl and lash the desert, they don’t just pick up grains of sand but also collect these past memories and deposit them on another patch in the vast, barren landscape. This particular place was once roamed by prehistoric animals and early humans on their way to the “great migration.” Then, about 12,000 years ago, during the Holocene African Humid Period, the Sahara was a giant lake, into a lush carpet of green vegetation. The moisture whiffing upwards from the desert leached the land into a dry, salty lakebed, which, today, people know as a desert.
The tale of the strange glowing white skull goes even deeper in the tunnel of time. This skull, as estimated by the scientists, formed sometime around 14,000 years ago. After the astronaut sent them the image, the scientists deciphered that it was a massive, cunning optical illusion cast by the distance between Earth and the International Space Station (ISS). What appeared to be the outline of a giant skull was actually the landscape of Trou au Natron, also called Emi Koussi caldera, located on the southern tip of the Tibesti Mountains of the northern Sahara in Chad.
Mystery of the glowing white skull
The whiteness, according to NASA Earth Observatory, was a result of salt deposits accumulated for millions of years, a naturally occurring salty mix of sodium carbonate decahydrate, sodium bicarbonate, sodium chloride, and sodium sulfate. The ghoul’s dark eyes were craters and depressions etched deep into the ground by past eruptions, as well as cinder cones mounted into steep conical hills built around the volcanic vents that towered above the caldera floor. Trou au Natron, according to Space.com, is a French phrase that translates to “big hole.”
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