location of the canadian badlands guardian

#Location of the canadian badlands guardian series

The Badlands Guardian is an example of the hollow face illusion. Like numerous geoglyphs across the world the Badlands Guardian can only be seen from above (Figure 3).Īlthough it is likely that nature conspired to produce this phenomenon by the interplay of countless random events, it is not impossible that a pre-existing landform could have been modified in specific ways to produce this face. Figure 3 The Badlands Guardian is not visible at ground level. This would not be the case if it were oriented in another direction. Dinosaur Provincial Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site situated a two hour drive east of Calgary. Figure 2 Appearance at noon on the summer solstice (left), Equinox (middle), and winter solstice (right).Įven more remarkable, the alignment of the feature to north and to the path of the sun is such that the feature maintains a consistent appearance at noon over the course of the year (Figure 2). : Landforms of Alberta: Hay-Zama Lakes, Badlands Guardian, Coteau Du Missouri, Whooping Crane Summer Range, Big Rock, Athabasca Basin. That it is aligned to north and depicts the indigenous people would seem to be an unlikely coincidence. It is situated at the confluence of the Bow River and the Elbow River in the south of the province, in an area of foothills and prairie, about 80 km east of the front ranges of the Canadian Rockies, roughly 299 km south of the provincial capital of Edmonton and approximately 2. That one of these formations is oriented to north is not unusual in itself. Calgary is a city in the western Canadian province of Alberta. There are perhaps hundreds or even thousands of similar badlands formations in North America. Second, the formation is aligned to north.

That it appears to represent the people native to the area is an interesting coincidence. Although the feature is thought to be the result of erosional processes there is much about it that is unusual.įirst is the visual form itself – that of a human figure, similar in appearance to the indigenous people from this part of Canada, wearing a headdress. The Badlands Guardian (also known as Indian Head) is a geomorphological feature located near Medicine. This feature known as the Badlands Guardian was first discovered in Google Earth imagery in 2005. This article is for quizzes on Monday June 6th.

Twenty-five miles east of the town of Medicine Hat in Alberta Canada is a landform that resembles a face looking due west. Figure 1 The Badlands Guardian is barely evident in Alberta’s earliest air photos taken in 1949-1951.

#Location of the canadian badlands guardian series

This series of articles discusses three surface features that resemble faces: a strange landform in Alberta Canada known as the Badlands Guardian that was discovered in 2005, a carved stone formation found by Daniel Ruzo on the Marcahuasi Plateau in Peru in the 1950s, and the Face on Mars, a mile-long structure on the surface of Mars first imaged by a Viking orbiter spacecraft in 1976.