What's inside this crater in Madagascar?

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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: https://youtu.be/YIOon-drZhE

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/publication/32048440_Resolving_the_Richat_enigma_Doming_and_hydrothermal_karstification_above_an_alkaline_complex

Here is Ndivhuwo Cecilia Mukosi’s original paper on the Ambohiby Complex: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318723814_Petrogenesis_of_the_Ambohiby_Complex_Madagascar_and_the_role_of_the_Marion_Hotspot_plume

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/2022/01/24/madagascars-famine-is-more-than-climate-change/

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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50 thoughts on “What's inside this crater in Madagascar?”

  1. Thanks so much for watching! This video was a massive collaboration over the course of several months, and there was so much material we couldn’t fit into the final piece. For an extended look at the interviews with the people living in and around the mountain, check out this bonus video: https://youtu.be/YIOon-drZhE

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  4. That's not Madagascar, that's Paradis island. Those are the remnants of the civilization that lived inside the walls: Maria, Sina, and Rose. The crater is a result of the the nuclear bombings that took place thousands of years after the age of the titans ended.

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  6. So what these people need is a road and means of transportation after a proper road is built. It needs to be a road which is not interfered by the rain, so gullies and places the rain must be diverted to, is also essential. Perhaps rain should be collected as well. Cynthia Allen-McLaglen

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  22. When I first say the crater i knew it was a volcano just had a feeling it would be a collapsed volcano crater. Volcanic land is the most fertile land to grown on. That’s wild how beautiful but rural the area is like.

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  26. how cool would it be, to give everything up, learn the native language, and move to a place like that to just live out a good simple, hard life.

    It sounds a lot better than most of our current easy and stressfully complex lives

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  28. And now they are exposed, soon you will have some real estate people passing by to make some money. Then you will have some others claiming the land is theirs and you need to pay for a piece of land. Or perhaps a big company wanting to buy it for planting. You did good sir, let’s see what happens next.

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  33. All those volcanoes could have started from meteor impacts and depending on the composition of the meteorites might have been just right enough to melt into the surface it impacted and blended with existing materials to create volcanoes….just food for thought

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  39. The conqueror mentality, la mente queriendo saberlo todo, pensando que tiene derecho. La verdad más pura, es que les fuiste "a romper los huevos" a esa gente. Ay, mijito, cuándo vas a aprender?

    Reply

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