Egypt, Feb 27- A giant sand pattern visible which baffled tourists and those scouring Google Earth, since it first appeared in March 1997, has turned out to be an environmental art installation.
Constructed in March 1997, the art installation titled Desert Breath, lies near El-Gouna, on the shores of the Red Sea, some 400km south of Cairo.
For years, it was thought to be many things, from a possible landing strip for extraterrestrial spacecraft to the portal to a parallel universe or even an ancient monument to a benevolent deity who had a keen eye for design and symmetry.
According to report in Daily Mail, it is, in fact, an installation by artists Danae Stratou, Alexandra Stratou and Stella Constantinides.
The installation features two interlocking spirals, one with vertical cones and the other with conical depressions in the desert floor.
It was originally designed with a small lake at its centre, but recent images on Google Maps, show the lake has since emptied.
The team designed and built the one million square foot piece of artwork to celebrate “the desert as a state of mind, a landscape of the mind”, their website reveals.
The recent images reveal the entire structure is slowly disintegrating as the sand blows off its cone-shaped hills and fills in the depressions.
-Indiatoday
