NASA / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
In the Sahara of Mauritania, on the Adrar Plateau, the desert opens into an enormous bullseye: concentric rings of rock some forty kilometres across, so large and so symmetrical that astronauts use it as a landmark from orbit. It is called the Richat Structure, or the Eye of the Sahara, and from above it looks unmistakably designed.
Dome, not crater
For years it was assumed to be a meteor impact crater. It is not. Geologists now understand it as a deeply eroded geological dome: layers of rock pushed up and then worn down over millions of years, with harder and softer bands eroding at different rates to leave the rings exposed. That is the mainstream explanation, and the evidence for it is solid.
And yet the proportions keep the other argument alive.
The Atlantis question
Because the Richat Structure is a series of concentric rings of land and what would have been water, on the edge of a region that was green and wet within human history, it has become the internet’s favourite candidate for Plato’s Atlantis, whose city Plato described as rings of land and sea. The mainstream answer is firmly that this is coincidence and erosion. But the size roughly fits, the shape roughly fits, and the Sahara really was fertile within the span of modern humans. It is a place where the geology says one thing and the human appetite for pattern says another, very loudly.
Where the real places end and the story begins
The rings, the scale, the erosion, the Atlantis debate: all real, you can see it for yourself on any satellite map.
In Stolen Genesis: Legacy Denied, the Richat Structure is the grave of Atlantis. Beneath one sector of the outermost ring, a drill bites into a chamber that has waited sixty thousand years for the right two people. The chamber is invented. The thing the novel borrows is real and slightly vertiginous: a structure so vast and so ring-perfect that, even knowing the geology, part of you refuses to believe nobody built it.
If that gap between what we can prove and what we can only wonder about is your kind of rabbit hole, the rest of the real places behind the novel are here, and the book itself is out now on Amazon.
Stolen Genesis: Legacy Denied is Book One of the Stolen Genesis series. The locations are real.