Fact-based Odd Places
The Giant Eye in the Sahara Is Not a Crater
From space, a bull's-eye about 40 kilometres wide stares up out of the desert in Mauritania, and the way it formed is slower and stranger than any falling rock from the sky.
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Fact-based Odd Places
New Zealand Has a Beach Scattered With Giant Stone Marbles
On a quiet stretch of the Otago coast, dozens of almost perfectly round boulders sit on the sand like marbles left by giants, and each one took millions of years to grow.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Is the Sea Salty When the Rivers Feeding It Are Fresh?
The rivers pouring into the sea taste fresh, yet the ocean is salty, and the answer is a very slow partnership between rain, rock and sunshine.
Fact-based Odd Places
China Has Hills Striped Like a Rainbow
In the far north-west of China, a range of hills is banded red, orange, yellow and green, as if someone had painted it with a very large brush, and the paint turns out to be rock.
Fact-based Odd Places
Turkey Has a Whole Hillside of White Stone Bathtubs
Hot springs at Pamukkale have spent thousands of years laying a thin white skin of stone down a 200-metre cliff, building a staircase of shallow pools the colour of the sky.
Fact-based Odd Places
After the Rain, Bolivia Gets the World's Biggest Mirror
The Salar de Uyuni is so flat that a thin film of rain turns it into a mirror 129 kilometres across, and when it dries, satellites use it to check their eyesight.
Fact-based Odd Places
Chile Has Marble Caves Carved Out by a Bright Blue Lake
On the shore of Chile's biggest lake, the water has hollowed solid marble into chapels, tunnels and pillars with smooth swirling walls, and it has done it in only a few thousand years.
Fact-based Odd Places
The Philippines Has More Than a Thousand Hills That Turn Chocolate Brown
On the island of Bohol, well over a thousand round grassy hills rise from the fields like sweets on a tray, green for much of the year and brown as cocoa when the dry season comes.