Home Plate

While much has been made of the so-called “home plate” formation – pictured above – recently discovered on Mars, there are equally intriguing, and beautiful, geological formations right here on Earth beside us.

Australia’s “Great Sandy Scars,” for instance, look like a huge rooster, or a mythical gryphon, bleached into the surface of the planet.
“In a small corner of the vast Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia,” the actual explanation reads, “large sand dunes – the only sand in this desert of scrub and rock – appear as lines stretching from left to right. The light-colored fan shapes are scars from wildfires.”
Or this desert view of Iran – the geology of evil, perhaps.

It’s the Dasht-e Kevir, or “valley of desert,” the largest desert in Iran, “a primarily uninhabited wasteland, composed of mud and salt marshes covered with crusts of salt that protect the meager moisture from completely evaporating.”
It looks like god came through with an abrader, geology on hyperdrive, polishing the planet down to stumps and fractal whorls.

(USGS global satellite image database discovered via Pruned. See also BLDGBLOG’s earlier satellite explorations of alluvial terrains, Libya, and the earth, observed).