Australia’s Northern Territory is home to nature’s ultimate highrise

Step over, Burj Khalifa. Forget Taipei 101 or Toronto’s CN Tower. There’s a highrise five times the height of the Empire State Building which takes up eight city blocks and houses a million residents.  And it’s sitting at the top end of Australia. If this is beginning to sound the stuff of dreams – or a Spielberg sci fi thriller - then let me clarify. We’re talking termites, here. As for the size – it’s relative.

Cathedral Heights

From the outside the tower appears lifeless, like rock or concrete, but break off a piece and an instant repair crew will swarm out. Worker termites. Harmless enough to us, but that sticky, honey-scented sap they secrete on your finger would be a debilitating acid, if you were a hundred times smaller.

Termites, or “white ants” as they’re sometimes mistakenly called, belong to the class of social insects that includes bees, ants, and wasps.  They’re found all over the world, perhaps best known for the damage they cause to wooden homes. Here in Northern Territory, it’s their architectural prowess that brings them fame. Despite a diminutive 5 mm size, tens or hundreds of thousands of termites working together can raise a structure that dwarfs comparative human accomplishments. They grow just 2–5 cm a year, which dates some of the mounds in the parks at more than a century.

As with  human skyscrapers, termite mounds attempt to create a near-perfect artificial environment. They offer  protection from bushfires, from wet-season floods, and from relentless tropical heat. All this from a mixture of dirt, chewed grass, and termite dung. It’s the grass which is the key component. The insulating qualities ensure that the inner thermostat remains an even 30° C, year round. Even under the baking Aussie sun.

Magnetic Marvels

As if giant termite towers weren’t enough, Australia’s Top End also plays host to another insect oddity – magnetic termites. A field of these mounds looks even eerier than the cathedral variety, especially at sunset. Tall, thin slabs, most of them facing the same direction (aligned from north to south) and looking for all the world like a field of gravestones. Think Flanders Fields. The termites apparently orient their homes along the earth’s magnetic field to maximize cooling, so the theory goes. How they tap into it, though, is still a mystery.

Australia, incidentally, is the only place in the world you’ll find them, and Litchfield Park has arguably the most spectacular examples of them in the world.

Both Cathedral and Magnetic termite mounds are on the itineraries of many day trips to Litchfield and Kakadu. Self-drivers will also find them well sign-posted from the highway (“Termites 18 km”). For any visitor to Darwin even remotely interested in nature’s wonders, standing next to such supreme animal architecture is awe-inspiring, and well worth the trip.

So the next time some human metropolis chortles about a new height record broken, the ‘tallest this’ or the ‘biggest that’, smile a little and spare a thought for the humble termite.

This article article was first published in TODAY.