Mystery behind Egypt's strange spiral unraveled

A mysterious spiral has been spotted in Egypt on Google Maps recently.

To some viewers, it looks like a landing strip for extraterrestrial spacecraft or perhaps the portal to a parallel universe, if not an ancient monument to a benevolent deity who had a keen eye for design and symmetry.

But what people are actually seeing in the desolate reaches of the Egyptian desert, just a short distance from the shores of the Red Sea, is in fact an environmental art installation. And it's been baffling tourists and armchair travelers since it was constructed in March 1997, Fox News reported.

Danae Stratou, Alexandra Stratou and Stella Constantinides worked as a team to design and build the enormous 1 million square foot piece of artwork called Desert Breath to celebrate "the desert as a state of mind, a landscape of the mind," as stated on the artists' website.

Constructed as two interlocking spirals one with vertical cones, the other with conical depressions in the desert floor Desert Breath was originally designed with a small lake at its center, but recent images on Google Maps show that the lake has emptied. he entire structure, in fact, is slowly disintegrating as the sand that forms the art piece slowly blows off its cone-shaped hills and fills in its depressions, making it "an instrument to measure the passage of time.