On satellite imagery, we spotted a village inside a strange crater in Madagascar. We set out to learn how it got there.

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Right in the center of the island nation of Madagascar there’s a strange, almost perfectly circular geological structure. It covers a bigger area than the city of Paris — and at first glance, it looks completely empty. But right in the center of that structure, there’s a single, isolated village: a few dozen houses, some fields of crops, and dirt roads stretching out in every direction.

When we first saw this village on Google Earth, its extreme remoteness fascinated us. Was the village full of people? How did they wind up there? And what did life look like in such a strange geography? To find out, we teamed up with a local team in Madagascar and fell down a rabbit hole of geology and mapping along the way. It’s a story of how continental shifts and volcanic geology came together to form a place for a group of people to call home.

Check out an extended look at the interviews in this video:    • Bonus interviews: What’s inside this ...  

We got to talk with a lot of experts along the way to make this piece. Here are links to some of their work:

Here is some of Michel Jébrak’s research on the Richat structure: https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...

Here is Ndivhuwo Cecilia Mukosi’s original paper on the Ambohiby Complex: https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...

We also spoke with Stian Rice, author of Famine in the Remaking, who helped us understand more about the history of agriculture in Madagascar: https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2022/01/2...

Check out Stian’s book on famine and food systems: https://wvupressonline.com/node/831

Norman Thomas Uphoff at Cornell’s SRI International Network also shared more about agricultural systems and innovation: http://sri.ciifad.cornell.edu/

Correction: At 2:52, we mistakenly labeled Lucienne Wilmé as a professor of geology at the University of Florida. In fact, she is a national coordinator of the Madagascar Program at the World Resources Institute.

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