Hi, new guy here with some screenshots of something weird I found on google maps!

reply to post by Anomaly84


Edit: I thought you said "don't". Yeah, I'm sure it's just expansion. Look at rafha and other nearby cities, the layouts are half hazard and random. They clearly don't have good city planners there.

This spot close by makes me feel heavy equipment is being used?

goo.gl...

reply to post by LeviWardrobe


Yeah, you're right, they do look modern but what on earth are they


There seems to be a few photos on google maps in the area but can't really see all that much

Antigod
reply to post by Anomaly84

 

Those pics look like archaeological sites, so I'd say they are showing the remains of the walls of abandoned structures.

Star on that one, I agree with your analysis. (Except for the first two, not sure what they may be or represent).

Rosinitiate

smurfy
I don't know who made them, but whoever it was, sure have a crooked eye in their heads.

Lol these would be the kind of lines I'd expect from our ancients if we are to believe we evolved from hunter gatherer. Yet most of the awe inspiring ancient sites manage to have remarkable perfection as if they had a surveyor and modern tools.

Well the thing is, if this is SA desert nothing is going to be around for long, the sand is all powerful. First off, some of the pictures are low 'walls' of some sort, and It's seems obvious in some of the pictures that the sand has been driven through at regular intervals, so they could be er..um sandbag walls, and the desert sand has driven through, or rather over at the point of least resistance, either that or lady Ga Ga has been out there drawing pretty pictures of eyelashes'

So it could have been ad hoc military bunkering, maybe Saddam's forces. Even there, a lot of that stuff would be under feet of sand by now.
Here's a good link about sand and what it can do, and very quickly,

www.environmentalgraffiti.com...

Camels aren't the only ships of the desert.

reply to post by Anomaly84


My dos centavos...

On photo number three, those liner mounds and horseshoe shaped mounds are all scraped on one side. The scrapes are not uni-directional as you might get from prevailing winds. Look at the square. It is pushed in from all four sides.

If I was putting money on it, I would say modern Earth moving equipment such as a bulldozer. Probably military engineers digging in a unit.

Obviously I could be wrong.

Paint ball berms???

Hello all...my two cents on this is based on my time spent in the "big sandbox" during the First Gulf War, Desert Shield/Storm.

I was an Infantryman with the 101st Airborne Div(Air Assault) and we spent a lot of time crisscrossing the desert in our helicopters.

I believe what we see in these pictures is the remains of the hundreds or thousands of troop encampments, ammunition supply points, hospitals, fighting positions, artillery battery's, etc.

We dug in at every location we were at during the build up and often had the help of heavy equipment from our engineer support units to dig/push up berms for our hummers. The Armor units around us had considerably more extensive trenches and fighting positions as well. The extent of these emplacements was hard to describe but keep in mind that just in my division there were over 5000 vehicles, 450+ rotorcraft, and 25,000 troops. And the coalition forces numbered over 750,000 troops in theater. That's lots of tents, bunkers, trenches, chow tents, latrines, support facilities, shops, and so on... spread out all over the country.

Again, just my opinion.

Cheers!

I think these are military fortifications from the Gulf War. During the build up to the the Persian Gulf War back in the 1990s we had to build up our forces prior to the attack. These berms look like whats left of the perimeter of the staging bases we once had their.

I doubt that these are as old as the gulf war as the bulldozer blade marks would have been blown away by now.

Maybe animal corals or temporary wind breaks for revegetation projects?

I found more.
Link maps

I'm going with either low-key towns or former towns. I know if I were to build anything in the desert, it would be underground.

I vote that they are some kind of military engineering test/training. Simply put, someone used a front end loader to berm up walls into various shapes.

The U-shaped walls have been used before in the desert as vehicle cover.
The scallops in the lower right seem to suggest they are trying to "nucleate" larger sand dunes.
The squares could be storage areas.

I would imagine on a flat desert plain you'd have to all but stumble directly on one of these to find it.

Great Find OP! I look forward to hearing more if someone is able to cross reference with other surveys or previous finds in that area.

I love Google Earth for this and have lost many an evening to searching for...whatever looks different..across endless stretches of desert or forest or ice. It's fun because this tech has only existed for a short time, as timelines go ...and I don't count the Military anymore than I count the US Navy for deep Sea surveying. The Military surveys what is militarily important and that's about the extent of it. So.....honestly? I have no doubt there are still major finds to be had out there, for literal lack of time on every area being looked at over the brief time it's been here to see like this.

Who knows...maybe this is a find of some kind? The desert sands expose and bury things all the time. Like a big magic game. Now ya see it, now ya don't From things out of Alexander the Great's time to the 1991 war, IMO.

well, there is a ruins site on the other side (west side) of the highway there, Qasr Zubalah. It's a good clip away, though, looks like maybe 30 or 40 kilometers (if not more) eyeballing Google's distance bar. I suppose it's possible it's ruins, I'm not entirely convinced it isn't anything but recent history. Considering this is practically spitting distance from the Iraqi border, and Gulf war refugees from Iraq lived in Rafha Camp up the road from this little spot, to around 2003, I'd say it's highly likely that this is the desert remains of a military encampment. Would you seriously set up a refugee camp just across the border from your enemy? Even more importantly, would you leave tens of thousands of foreign refugees to their own devices on the border between you & Saddam? That would have been asking for disaster. Rafha Camp was full of Iraqi military deserters & fleeing civilians, it would have been a nice place to bombard for Saddam if left unguarded & such.

Strategically, it just makes sense to be a military encampment. Even if the encampment had little to do with the refugee camp up the road, it makes perfect sense for a strategically placed military set-up. You know people are crossing the border in the area, and you probably have the Iraqi military patrolling up & down their side watching for runners & looking for an opportunity to strike.

Maybe an old military training site? They have some very big dozers there.

reply to post by Anomaly84


These are really interesting...

I wonder.... if you dont mind me asking.. is your profession connected to ancient archaeology?

Gulf War, 98% sure.

The lines leading up to the berms are where they dug out the earth to build them. Some look like front end loader, some look like backhoe. The star in the upper left of pic 3 is likely a latrine site that was buried.

The square with the horseshoes on each corner is likely a field hospital site. The reversed corner berms are designed to deaden sound from generators, A/C units and NBC filtration packs.

I was in a medical unit, and our sites looked like this when we could get engineers.

Anomaly84
Hey, I was just messing around on google maps and I came across some weird 'structures' in the sands in Saudi Arabia.

Does anyone have any idea what these are?

postimg.org...
postimg.org...
postimg.org...
postimg.org...
postimg.org...

Cheers!

An educated guess is that these are abandoned Bedouin camp sites. The squares would be for the tents (the big ones for communal tents) and the circles would be for the fences to keep the livestock penned in. Here's a model of a Bedouin camp:

Model of Bedouin camp site

That would explain why it's abandoned (the Bedoiun packed up and moved somewhere else) and why it looks relatively modern (the Bedouin have been migrating around the desert as nomads for centuries).

...or am I barking up the wrong tree here?

GoodOlDave

Anomaly84
Hey, I was just messing around on google maps and I came across some weird 'structures' in the sands in Saudi Arabia.

Does anyone have any idea what these are?

postimg.org...
postimg.org...
postimg.org...
postimg.org...
postimg.org...

Cheers!

An educated guess is that these are abandoned Bedouin camp sites. The squares would be for the tents (the big ones for communal tents) and the circles would be for the fences to keep the livestock penned in. Here's a model of a Bedouin camp:

Model of Bedouin camp site

That would explain why it's abandoned (the Bedoiun packed up and moved somewhere else) and why it looks relatively modern (the Bedouin have been migrating around the desert as nomads for centuries).

...or am I barking up the wrong tree here?

Thanks all for your replies!

The majority vote seems to be military related but I still really don't know! Surely the wind would've eroded these camp sites away already if it was Gulf War related? And if it's modern why is there nothing else there?

I did think about bedouin camps, but would they have the equipment to move the sand in such a way? And why would they make a line 200m long?

There's so many unusual and varying 'designs', I hope someone has a definite answer for us!