The Franz Josef archipelago lies hundreds of miles north of the Russian mainland. The archipelago is a group of 191 islands that lie in three rough groups.
Champ Island is the southernmost island of the Zichy group, which is the central and largest group and was named after William C. Champ – the leader of a relief operation that searched for the Fiala-Zeigler polar expedition. These facts aren’t all that makes this island remarkable, however.
The landscape, which is otherwise very barren, is littered with perfectly round balls of sandstone. Resembling monstrous marbles, some of which are no larger than ping-pong balls and some of which are six meters or more in height, they give the island’s landscape a somewhat unreal, cosmic appearance.
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According to the Siberian Times, from the first time this phenomenon was seen, visitors took to calling these unusual spheres the “footballs of the Gods.”
Looking at the balls, their consistency and uniformity of shape make it very hard to imagine that they weren’t somehow shaped by human hands.
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