A Man Was Scrolling Google Maps—Then He Noticed Google Maps Staring Back at Him

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Nature generally doesn’t form perfect circles in organic landscapes, but a strange island in the Paraná Delta in Argentina may be an exception to that rule.
• El Ojo, a 120-meter island of decomposing plant matter, is a near-perfect circle inside an equally round lake.
• First spotted on Google Maps in 2016, the formation resembles ice disks, which spin when river eddies create rotational shear—and scientists say the same forces are at work in this wetland 50 miles northwest of Buenos Aires.

When you spot perfect circles in isolated places from a bird’s eye view, whether from an airplane or while poking around on Google Maps, the formation is usually one of two things. The most common is central pivot irrigation, a farming technique designed for pipes on wheels to rotate like the hands of a clock around a central well, forming green cropland in otherwise untamed landscapes. The second, albeit more rare, explanation is crop circles, which despite what some would have you believe are very much terrestrial.

Now, there might be a third explanation—and it’s the weirdest one yet.

Back in 2016, a filmmaker named Sergio Neuspiller told the Argentinian outlet El Observador that he’d spotted something odd while researching material for a film about the Paraná Delta located in northern Buenos Aires province. While tooling around on Google Maps, Neuspiller spotted what looked like an eyeball “in the middle of nowhere,” he said.

“It was circular, and the perimeter surrounding it was also a perfectly formed circle,” he said to El Observador, and he soon traveled to the location. “We found the perfect circle, just as it appears from the air. The water looked black, but it was actually completely transparent, something almost impossible to find in the delta, but it had a black earth bottom.”

The island forms the iris of a slightly larger lake, hence its fitting name, El Ojo, or “the Eye.” It spans roughly 120 meters and is made of floating grasses, rushes, and other decomposed plant matter. A search through older Google Maps imagery shows the island dates back to at least 2003, and it remains there today.

But what exactly created its near-perfect circumference? Well, the short answer is nature, but the longer answer is a bit more complicated. This isn’t the first time that nature’s produced a similar perfect circle. The Presumpscot River in Maine, for example, spawned a spinning ice disk when nearby eddies generated rotational shear. A similar ice circle formed back in 2013 along the Sheyenne River in North Dakota, and the first known description of such a phenomenon dates back to 1895 along the Mianus River in Estonia.

Of course, El Ojo isn’t made of ice, but the underlying principles remain the same. It’s likely that the river currents flowing beneath this mat of vegetation are similarly promoting a rotational shear that forms both the circular island and lake, while also causing the “iris” to slowly rotate clockwise.

This slow-but-steady rotation will eventually cause El Ojo to shrink over time as it erodes further and further. So fire up Google Maps and appreciate this marvel of nature while it’s still there.