  Chiral monopoles are hedgehoglike structures in local chiral condensates in
QCD. These monopoles are (i) made of quark and gluon fields; (ii) explicitly
gauge-invariant; and (iii) they carry quantized and conserved chromomagnetic
charge. We argue that the chiral condensate vanishes in a core of the chiral
monopole while the density of these monopoles increases with temperature wiping
out the quark condensate in quark-gluon plasma. We suggest that the dynamics of
the chiral monopoles is responsible for the chiral symmetry restoration in high
temperature phase of QCD. We also argue that the chiral monopoles are unlikely
to be associated with confining degrees of freedom. In our approach the chiral
symmetry restoration and the color deconfinement in QCD are not necessarily
related to each other and the corresponding transitions may occur at different
temperatures.
