Through The Sandglass

It's not just Namibian fairies

 

Described as one of the last great enigmas or mysteries, the so-called fairy circles of the arid lands of Namibia remain to be explained. Theories abound, and the fairies have stimulated "lively" academic debate, if not discord. The circles occur in their millions in a band of dry grassland stretching 1800 kilometres south from the Angolan border - but it's now clear that Australia has its own fairies.

In both places, countless circles dot the landscape like a pox of some kind:

Fairy circles in the Marienfluss Valley of Namibia.

(Google Earth image, ~ 650m across)

The circles are rimmed with (more or less) growing grass, vary in size up to several metres across and would seem to grow. Within them their is nothing but bare earth. Explanations include ostriches, rolling zebras, underground gas (or dragons' breath), footsteps of the gods, microbial activity, poisonous plants, termites, and the competition for scarce water. It's the last two that form the main rival hypotheses. As far as biologist Norbert Juergens of the University of Hamburg is concerned, it's termites. But Stephan Getzin of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig disagrees - for him and his colleagues, fairy circles result from the way plants organize themselves in response to water shortage. Here's the abstract of this group's paper:

Vegetation gap patterns in arid grasslands, such as the “fairy circles” of Namibia, are one of nature’s greatest mysteries and subject to a lively debate on their origin. They are characterized by small-scale hexagonal ordering of circular bare-soil gaps that persists uniformly in the landscape scale to form a homogeneous distribution. Pattern-formation theory predicts that such highly ordered gap patterns should be found also in other water-limited systems across the globe, even if the mechanisms of their formation are different. Here we report that so far unknown fairy circles with the same spatial structure exist 10,000 km away from Namibia in the remote outback of Australia. Combining fieldwork, remote sensing, spatial pattern analysis, and process-based mathematical modeling, we demonstrate that these patterns emerge by self-organization, with no correlation with termite activity; the driving mechanism is a positive biomass–water feedback associated with water runoff and biomass-dependent infiltration rates. The remarkable match between the patterns of Australian and Namibian fairy circles and model results indicate that both patterns emerge from a nonuniform stationary instability, supporting a central universality principle of pattern-formation theory. Applied to the context of dryland vegetation, this principle predicts that different systems that go through the same instability type will show similar vegetation patterns even if the feedback mechanisms and resulting soil–water distributions are different, as we indeed found by comparing the Australian and the Namibian fairy-circle ecosystems. These results suggest that biomass–water feedbacks and resultant vegetation gap patterns are likely more common in remote drylands than is currently known.

 Note "no correlation with termite activity."

The patterns are fascinatingly regular and there has been a suggestion that the geometry of organisation is, bizarrely, directly equivalent to that of skin cells. Robert Sinclair, who heads the Mathematical Biology Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) in Japan, and his collaborator, Haozhe Zhang, were the first to identify this strange analogy. 

Two apparently unrelated systems on vastly different scales -- fairy circles in the Namibian desert (left) and microscopic skin cells (right) -- appear to share a similar pattern, which is very, very unusual.

Credit: Image courtesy of Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology - OIST

 

From the Science Daily report:

Both the majority of fairy circles and majority of cells have six neighbors. But the similarity gets even more specific -- the percentage of fairy circles with four, five, six, seven, eight and nine neighbors is essentially the same as the skin cells. "I didn't expect it to be so close," Sinclair said. "We spent a lot of time checking because it really looked too close to believe."

... The researchers suspect the patterns might be similar because both skin cells and fairy circles are fighting for space. If true, scientists might one day be able to glean information about systems just by analyzing patterns. For example, they could search for signs of life on other planets or moons, where images are usually the only data initially available.

Finding such a pattern could also benefit ecology and biology in general. Understanding processes on one scale could illuminate what is happening at the other end of the spectrum. "Otherwise, we need a whole new theory for each type of system we study, and may miss general principles, or, as some say, not see the forest for the trees," Sinclair said.

Self-organising systems and patterns are widespread and intriguing - I can't help but think of so-called "patterned ground," the permafrost polygons of the periglacial regions, the patterns on Mars (and now on Pluto), and various strange behaviours of granular materials...

Oh, and in aid of conservation in the NamibRand Nature Reserve, you can, if you wish, adopt a fairy circle. 

[Image at the head of this post credit, Stephan Getzin. The BBC has a very good piece summarising this mysterious phenomenon]

Theeb

 

"Epic" "intimate" "brutal" "riveting" "spellbinding" "spectacular." The adjectives come tumbling out of the reviews - but please see this movie for yourself. Described as an "Arabic Western" and a "coming of age story," I suspect that this is one of those rare films that stimulates a unique reaction in every viewer. 

Directed by British-born Jordanian Naji Abu Nowar, the story is set during the First World War at the time of the Arab Revolt, and, given that it was filmed in and around Wadi Rum, the instinctive reaction is "ah, Lawrence of Arabia." But, other than the location and the historical context, these films have absolutely nothing in common. "Theeb" is filmed entirely with Bedouin people for whom this is their first experience of acting; it is their story and, most of all, it is the story of a young Bedouin boy caught up in a strange and frightening journey and through whose eyes we perceive the events.

Theeb ("wolf") is played by Jacir Eid Al-Hwietat. Abu Nowar has commented that he "never actually liked [Jacir] as an actor as he was so shy and quiet and I never considered him, but he has this crazy thing that when you put him on camera he a different person. Immediately it became obvious. And so he was the first person we cast and we never looked back or at anyone else." It is indeed not only this kid's extraordinary performance but the kid himself that makes this movie, and, together with Abu Nowar's unique and sensitive directing skills, creates an intangible grip on the viewer. And this grip lasts for the entire film - at the end I could not fathom how one hundred minutes had just gone by.

Watch the trailer:

 

In a fascinating interview, Abu Nowar comments that:

The time in which the film is set is the single most important period in Middle-Eastern history. That’s when the end of a 400 year empire came to be and radical redrawing of the map which we are still suffering from today. With all the issues going on in Iraq, Syria, with the Kurds and the Turks, Israel and Palestine, Saudi Arabia and the Yemen. All of these issues we hear about today are a direct result from that single moment in history. So, it was such a crucial moment and such an existential crisis for the region and I like the mirror of the character going through a similar sort of crisis.

and

For myself I wanted to make something that felt authentic to the Bedouin. And so I tried to listen to them as much as possible and incorporated their feelings and thoughts as much as I could. All of it was just exciting for me. I love their poetry. I love their stories and so it was why it comes about in that way. In no way was I trying to enforce a cinematic understanding of storytelling onto subject matter, it is really the subject matter informing it.

And I think that is why is has that feel because it is really genuine. Sometimes the best thing you can do as a director is to step out of the way and not put you two cents in and let people do their thing. I do that and I like getting surprised by what they come up with. That’s the enjoyment of it. There were things all along the way, for example the sound design adding little tiny moments here and there that you pick up and generally just member of the team surprising you. It was a lot of fun.

"Theeb" premiered at the 71st Venice International Film Festival on 4 September 2014, where Abu Nowar won the award for Best Director. It was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards, making it the first Jordanian nomination ever. 

Herewith, a selection of reviews: Rotten Tomatoes (5 stars), Huff Post, New York Times, and The Guardian. Read them, enjoy them, but please find this film and watch it.