Brazil's Hidden Dirt Grid: 200 Million Termite Mounds Reveal Ancient Underground Network
Researchers mapped roughly 200 million red-dirt murundus in Brazil’s caatinga, showing they are spoil heaps, not nests, created by the leaf-eating termite Syntermes dirus as it dug a vast underground tunnel network. The cones are about 2.5 meters tall and spaced ~20 meters apart, over about 230,000 square kilometers—the size of Great Britain—with mound centers dating from roughly 690 to 3,820 years old, indicating four millennia of self-organized engineering that moved around 10 cubic kilometers of soil. The scale is so large that it’s described as the most extensive insect-driven bioengineering, yet a queen and a mapped map of the tunnels remain undiscovered. Satellite imagery enabled the discovery; researchers plan targeted digging to understand the architecture, while ongoing land-clearing in the Caatinga threatens the site.
