What resembles a skull is located in northern Chad, at the bottom of the Tru-o-Natron volcano, also called Dun-Orey: a volcanic caldera, or crater, measuring 1,000 meters across.
NASA Earth Observatory reports that this massive volcanic pit formed after a powerful eruption hundreds of thousands of years ago. It sprawls in the heart of the Tibesti mountain range, which runs about 480 kilometers across the central Sahara and spans Chad and Libya.
From space, the bottom of the caldera strikingly resembles a skull. From the ground, however, it looks fairly ordinary, Live Science reported.
A 2023 astronaut photo reveals what looks like a mouth, a nose, and pale cheeks. That pale color comes from layers of salts — a natural mix of sodium carbonate decahydrate, sodium bicarbonate, sodium chloride, and sodium sulfate. Those salts form thick, layered crusts that crack like paint.
Meanwhile, the areas around the “eyes” and “nostrils” are built from scoria cones. These steep conical hills formed around volcanic vents and rise above the rest of the crater floor. The darker patch to the left of the face is a shadow cast by the high rim of the caldera, which helps give the formation its skull-like outline.
Today Tru-o-Natron shows no signs of life, but researchers say a glacial lake once occupied the caldera. In the 1960s, scientists found fossils of marine snails and plankton under the salt-crusted caldera floor, dated to about 14,000 years ago. A 2015 expedition found algae fossils up to 120,000 years old.
The caldera has been dormant since it formed. It sits near Tarso-Toussied, a large volcanic plateau covered in solidified lava. A stratovolcano there is classified as active by the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program, even though it hasn’t erupted in more than 12,000 years.
Tru-o-Natron isn’t unique: Nicaragua’s Chiltepe Peninsula in Lake Managua also makes a skull-shaped pattern from space, where two volcanic lakes sit in separate calderas.
Photo: NASA
