The Mima mounds are one of the strangest landscape features on Earth.
Are they Native American burial mounds? Were they caused by earthquakes or glaciers? Aliens’ constructions?
Now, scientists think they’ve discovered their mysterious formation process and it’s really surprising!
The Mima mounds look like weird circular hillocks measuring up to 2m (7ft) in height and 50m (160ft) in diameter. These strange features are found all around the world, but are most common in North America.
The big mystery surrounding Mima mounds is that, until now, nobody really knew how they formed.
Believe it or not, scientists suggest, in a new paper presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco, that these geological oddities are created by tiny burrowing animals, called gophers.
Pretty surprising, no? You bet that it takes many hundreds of years to make a Mima mound.
