A “Giant Man” Discovered In The Australian Outback Is Shrouded In Mystery, And It Can Be Seen From Space

The mysterious piece of earthen art, known as Marree Man, has garnered attention worldwide ever since a pilot discovered it in 1998. The image of a hunter holding what appears to be a stick or boomerang is etched into a plateau in South Australia.

Marree Man is a geoglyph, a structure made of earthen materials that is so big it is best viewed from above and measures 3.5 kilometers (2.2 miles) from top to bottom. The Nazca Lines in Peru serve as an example of a geoglyph that is even larger.

Marree Man, named after a nearby town, was a noticeable feature in the area for a long time, but the lines gradually disappeared. In the natural-color images taken by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 in 2013, they were hardly discernible.

Local business owners decided to restore the deteriorating geoglyph in August 2016 because they were worried about losing what had become a tourist attraction. They redrawn Marree Man over the course of five days using a construction grader and precise GPS coordinates for the original.

The updated geoglyph was designed with wind grooves to trap water and promote the growth of vegetation, so the restoration team believes it will last longer than the original. They anticipate that vegetation will eventually turn the lines green. On June 22, 2019, the OLI captured this picture of the feature.

Despite the recent announcement of a cash reward for reliable information regarding it, it is still unknown who created the geoglyph and why. Marree Man may have been created by an Alice Springs-based artist, though other cues point to an American as the possible creator.

Using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey, Lauren Dauphin created an image for the NASA Earth Observatory. Author: Adam Voiland

Sources: 1, 2