We've visited the formation on the 21st of June:
The field had the formation roughly in the middle, with a radius of
roughly 30 meters. The field had also a lot of other, random areas
of lying barley which didn't seem geometric.
The stems:
I shall refer to stems of lying barley from the formation as
"formation-stems", standing barley (both in the formation and outside of
it) as "control-stems" and lying barley outside of the formation as
"randomly lying stems":
- In each formation-stem, the first node from the top was elongated. It
was roughly twice as long as the first node of the control stem. This
was the case in all of the stems we examined.
These formation stem nodes were also much darker than the control, and
bent about 40 degrees. In the randomly lying stems the first nodes
didn't show any difference to those of the control stems.
- In each formation stem, the 2nd and 3rd nodes showed signs of being
pressured from the inside. They were swollen on one side, but not
completely open. The control and the randomly lying stems didn't show
that effect.
- The formation stems were bent 90 degrees on the point were they
emerged out of the ground. The randomly lying stems were bent in
different angles, 70 - 90 degrees, in different heights above the
ground, 0 - 20 cm.
Formation stems:
The pattern:
The pattern in which the barley was flattened in the formation is a very
complicated one. There are several layers on top of each other, each in
a different direction.
Every 50cm or so there are areas where a lot of barley-heads were
bundled together, and they form sort of a "smooth" surface. These
surfaces are pushed closer to the ground than the rest.
Since they repeat every 50cm or so and are deeper, they create sort of
waves through the formation.
In the flattened triangle areas of the formation there was a clear
centre with a few standing stems, and the flattened stems around it were
flattened in a rotating direction.
Although the complicated pattern seems almost random, it creates a
subtle geometric shape of the ground. In the areal shot, if you look
carefully at the flattened triangular areas, you can see that they are
divided into 3 smaller triangles by the direction of the lying barley.
This was impossible to notice when standing in the formation.
Other plants:
In the tractor lines there wasn't any mature barley, so a lot of other
plants (and young barley) used the open ground to grow. These were not
effected by the creation of the formation. As a result, we can see green
lines of standing plants crossing the formation.
A climbing plant (Some sort of Ivy), which climbed on the barley, was
flattened with it. It didn't seem to suffer any damage - the leaves were
still green and the plant seemed alive although the formation was
already probably over a week old and the weather during that week was
extremely hot. The plant was still wrapped around the Barley stems,
lying with them. There were no signs of pressure of the leaves.
The field had also a small thistle infection. The thistle remained
standing as far as I can tell.
In the following picture you can see that the stem comes out of the
ground, lies flat for 20cm or so, and then turns upwards and grows
leaves. We have seen such thistle also in the rest of the field, and it
seems to me that it grows horizontally without leaves to a point where
it gets enough sun light, and then it grows upwards, but I don't know it
for sure.
Perhaps the thistle in this picture suffered partially from the creation
of the formation...
Strob |
