A team of Australian scientists have stumbled upon an actual Eye Of Sauron from The Lord Of The Rings. Well, ish. It's off the coast of the country in the form of a submerged volcano that was active millions of years ago.
"There he took up again his great Ring in Barad-dur, and dwelt there, dark and silent, until he wrought himself a new guise, an image of malice and hatred made visible; and the Eye of Sauron the Terrible few could endure." That's a quote from The Silmarillion, not the oceanographers who found this fascinating formation 3,000 metres below the surface of the sea. Volcanoes come in different shapes and sizes and this one erupted so frequently and so explosively that the structure ultimately crumbled and collapsed. This leaves a caldera and there are a number of famous ones on terra firma - Crater Lake, the Galápagos Islands and Yellowstone are all calderas to name but a few.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is on its way in 2022, and while that feels a long while off, what we've seen of the game so far definitely has piqued our interest. Check out some gameplay below.
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As shown in the image below, the team simply could not help themselves and had to name the formation after the imposing and terrifying mountains in the books. "Our 'Barad-dûr' is surrounded by sharp peaks and pinnacles," said Tim O'Hara, the lead scientist, in an interview with SYFY WIRE. "Our 'Ered Lithui' is covered by a layer of pumice stones-perhaps from the Eye of Sauron, or even from more recent eruptions, such as Krakatoa, so it really is a 'mountain of ash'." The most amazing part of this story for me is that the "Eye Of Sauron" actually has a "pupil" in its centre.
Gives me the shivers even looking at it. The oceanographers used multibeam sonar on the RV Investigator in a two-week long investigation of the seafloor surrounding Australia. "Using a multibeam sonar on all these structures revealed all their marvelous detail, in comparison to the way they show up as fuzzy blobs on maps of gravity measurements from satellites," continued O'Hara. They also realised that the formation might have been created in the Cretaceous period, when Tyrannosaurus rex was stomping about on the Earth.
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Furthermore, the subduction (when two tectonic plates collide and one slides under the other) of the ocean crust may have allowed a volcano to emerge even if it is underwater. It's unknown whether the "Eye Of Sauron" is still active as the significant changes to its structure as a result of the caldera may have diminished its potential for eruptions. Diminished, but not totally impossible. Cool, isn't it?
Featured Image Credit: New Line Cinema, Björn Austmar Þórsson via PexelsTopics: News, The Lord Of The Rings