Giant ‘megacity’ the size of UK can be seen from space – and it wasn’t made by humans | Weird | News

While the idea that the Great Wall of China can be seen from space has emerged as a myth, some super-sized building projects can be seen from orbit, and not all of them were built by humans. Syntermes dirusThe termite, a species of termite native to Brazil, has formed a large collection of 8-foot-tall mounds covering an area the size of Great Britain.

Each mound can take thousands of years to complete and can reach almost 30 feet wide. But there are so many of these so-called “murundas,” estimated at two hundred million at last count, that together they have become a massive landmark that can be seen from miles above.

While the Great Pyramid of Cheops is often hailed as an architectural triumph, tiny termites moved approximately 10 km3 (2.4 cu mi) of soil; this was enough to create four thousand piles, each the size of the iconic Egyptian monument. This has been described as the equivalent of people building a building four times the height of the Burj Khalifa or 320 times the height of Big Ben, with no plans, researchers or pesky health and safety regulations.

The tiny insects, with a canopy longer than half an inch, live almost exclusively in the fallen leaves of a single tree species. Scientists say the huge mounds are just piles of waste for a vast network of interconnected underground “cities” stretching for miles.

The hard, dry and relatively infertile soil in the region is not only unsuitable for construction but also unattractive for farmers; thus the mounds survived intact for up to 4,000 years in some cases.

Although locals have known about the mounds for centuries, the size and remarkable regularity of the construction became apparent only relatively recently, after being seen in satellite photographs.

“I looked on Google Earth and noticed they were all over this region, but I couldn’t find anything about them online,” Stephen Martin of the University of Salford told New Scientist in 2018.

Termites will collect the small, spiny leaves that fall from nearby caatinga forests only once a year, and Martin says there is a mad scramble to collect as many leaves as possible: “It’s as if all the supermarkets were open one day a year, the person with the fastest car would buy the most food,” he explains.

“You need a road network to get to the supermarket as quickly as possible because you are in open competition with other colonies.”

The researchers found that each mound did not represent a separate colony, as no aggression was found between the termites in each “mound” and their immediate neighbors.

However, if termites are removed from their home nest and transported to a hill several kilometers away, fighting is inevitable.

It is not yet clear how far the boundaries of each termite colony extend. Although most termite colonies are centered around a single egg-laying queen, Stephen Martin and his research team have not found a royal chamber in any of the mounds they have excavated so far, so the structure and size of the colonies are still unknown.

Another puzzle, Martin says, is how termites manage to survive when food supplies are available for such a short period of time. “We don’t know anything [termite] “They are species that hibernate, but maybe that’s what they do,” he says.