Global weather patterns are recreated in the spinning skirts of Whirling Dervishes, scientists have discovered.
A force that links the Earth's rotation with the direction of circulating air currents is partly responsible for the hypnotic appearance of the mystic dancers, research has shown.
The Coriolis effect, well known to meteorologists, causes the deflection of objects on a rotating surface, resulting in winds circulating clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and anti-clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.
It also produces mesmerising patterns of sharp peaks and gentle troughs that appear on the flowing surfaces of Dervishes' cone-shaped skirts, a computer modelling study has shown.
By entering the right set of Coriolis equations, scientists were able to reproduce shapes strikingly similar to those seen in the whirling skirts.
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The Whirling Dervish dance, a popular tourist attraction in Turkey, has been performed for more than 700 years by the Sufi, an Islamic mystic order.
A form of moving meditation, the act of spinning on the spot is said to bring the Dervishes into a state of bliss.
Study author Dr James Hanna, from Virginia Polytechnic Institute in the US, said: "The dancers don't do much but spin around at a fixed speed, but their skirts show these very striking, long-lived patterns with sharp cusp-like features which seem rather counter-intuitive.
"The flow of a sheet of material is much more restrictive than the flow of the atmosphere, but nonetheless it results in Coriolis forces. What we found was that this flow, and the associated Coriolis forces, plays a crucial role in forming the dervish-like patterns."
