Aurora Newman
Ephemeral Spectre
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2015
- Messages
- 420
- Location
- Brighton
Have to see if I noted down the areas, honestly thought it was common in most places.
Iceland.some cultures have rocks as fairy circles.
An update, and perhaps a breakthrough ... Field research in western Australia has finally provided empirical evidence supporting the notion that desert fairy circles are the result of a Turing pattern.
FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/myster...ained-by-alan-turing-theory-from-70-years-ago
More on Oz fairy Circles.
A small study published last month in the Australian Journal of Botany suggests that microbes living in the soil may contribute to the rings’ formation in Australia, rendering the dirt within the ring hostile to new seedlings and the dirt beyond the ring hospitable.
Spinifex grasses start out as small round hummocks, said Angela Moles, an ecologist at the University of New South Wales and an author of the new paper. Then, as new seedlings sprout outward, the plants in the middle die, leading to the ring shape. Researchers have explored whether the bare inner soil becomes depleted of nutrients; whether it is too dry or compacted for new growth; and whether insects might be destroying the spinifex. But a consensus on what is driving the formation of rings has yet to emerge.
Dr. Moles had heard of a small European swamp grass that grew in a ring pattern, a result of a buildup of soil pathogens in the middle. She and Neil Ross, a graduate student in her lab, were curious whether sterilizing the soil from inside rings, thus killing any microbial organisms there, would make it easier for plants to grow in it. If so, that would imply that microbes were involved. ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/12/science/fairy-circles-australia.html
An update, and perhaps a breakthrough ... Field research in western Australia has finally provided empirical evidence supporting the notion that desert fairy circles are the result of a Turing pattern.
FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/myster...ained-by-alan-turing-theory-from-70-years-ago
Alternatively, scientists have proposed that fairy circles are the result of plants arranging themselves to make the most of limited water resources in a harsh, arid environment.
It sounds plausible, and if true, would also happen to be another naturally occurring example of a Turing pattern. But there's not a lot of empirical evidence to actually support the hypothesis, researchers say, because the kinds of physicists who tend to model the Turing dynamics of these systems rarely end up also conducting field work in the desert in support of their ideas.
"There is a strong imbalance between the theoretical vegetation models, their a priori assumptions and the scarcity of empirical proof that the modelled processes are correct from an ecological point of view," a team led by ecologist Stephan Getzin from the University of Göttingen in Germany explains in a new paper.