Carhenge is a replica of the 4,500 year old Stonehenge ruin in England. It was built by Jim Reinders in Nebraska, USA, using 38 vintage automobiles spray-painted gray and posed after the original sarsens, lintels, and altar stones of Stonehenge. Now the work is surrounded by a ring of ‘portal’ cars, dinosaurs, and giant fish, spray-painted in gaudy colors and forming a wider ‘Car Art Reserve’. Altar ‘stone’. Photo by Jeremy Burgin. Carhenge consists of 38 automobiles arranged in a circle measuring about 29 metres in diameter. Some are held upright in pits 1.5 metres deep, trunk end down, and arches have …
Aral: the sea that vanished overnight
The Aral Sea was once one of the four largest lakes in the world, situated between Kazakhstan in the north and Uzbekistan in the south. In the 1960’s the Soviet Union redirected its tributary rivers into irrigation projects, and as a result by 2007 it had shrunk to 10% of its original size. Once prosperous fishing towns like Muynak were left stranded miles from the retreating waters, their boats high and dry on the salt-encrusted desert sand. Photo by Urban Explorer.
Dunes envelop the Namibian toytown of Kolmanskop
One day a giant went to play in the Namibian desert. He made a toytown village out of bits of things he found lying around; the husks of scorpion shells, desiccated bones, sand-sifted diamonds, and brightly colored plaster. He lined up his toytown houses in neat little rows, serviced them with a tinker rail-line, then sat back and sighed in contentment. The next day he walked away and left the toytown to the sands. Kolmanskop is a ghost town in the deserts of Namibia, built by the DeBeers mining company in 1908, abandoned in 1956 after diamond prices crashed. The …
The half-built ruin of the Dreamer’s Gate
Before you stands a gate. It rears 7 meters high and the fence it bifurcates stretches on for as far as the eye can see. Its walls glisten and seem to move with a life of their own. Across their endless expanses giant figures burrow, retreating behind blankets of spiders webs, emerging again down spiral staircases far off in the distance. Through the gate you can see the Dreamtime. You see the pattern of the land, and the Songlines that have sprung up around it. Gaze into it for long enough and you might even catch a glimpse of the …
The lava-engulfed ruins of Paricutin cathedral
The sky is black with ash-fall. People are standing in the streets, looking up into the fog. They hold out their hands, and little mounds of grainy black stone gather. Down the clay-walled guinnels of the town you hear the cathedral bells ringing a discordant pattern, as though God himself is beating the life out of them. The ground jumps and growls underfoot. You look around, into the faces of your neighbors, and wonder what sin you have committed to deserve this. Then you see the first of the slow-rolling waves of lava, inching their way down the mountainsides towards …
The Ruins of Warcraft
The online fantasy game World of Warcraft is awash with ruins. Half of the in-game quests involve pilfering buried treasure from cities razed by the Scourge, temples leveled by the Lich King, and craters where force field-encapsulated cities once lay. A large part of the joy of the game (IMHO) comes from exploring these areas and their eerily haunting graphics. The ruins of Bashal’Aran
Ruins of the Statue of Liberty
The Statue of Liberty is an icon, a beacon-fire at America`s shore calling out to all and sundry- `come on in, there`s plenty of room!` To destroy her is to denounce the very idea of America, to throw that generosity of spirit back in her face and cry out `who needs you?` Aliens have done this a few times. Meteors twice. Global warming and global sanding have been involved also. In disaster movies the destruction of Lady Liberty has become something of a cliche, but that doesn`t stop it from being awesome. Read on for the gallery.
The ruins of LOST
The TV show LOST is all about ruins.? The island itself is a living museum, a place where the relics of millennia-old statues rest side by side with downed aircraft and underground research stations, all of them abandoned fossils of our cultural evolution. A huge part of the show`s appeal has been the Indiana Jones-esque exploration of these ruins. It`s one of the reasons I`m such a big LOST fan. Click through to relive the adventure.
7 Massive Holes in the Earth
The Earth’s face is a pock-marked, scarified thing, riddled with enormous holes dug by human hands or caused by the caprices of nature. Deep ‘blue hole’ lagoons accrete within coral reefs, volcanoes tear the earth apart leaving enormous smoking craters…
Nuclear Craters on the Marshall Islands
The impact was immediate and massive. In a second the fireball of flame, earth and smoke spread almost four and half miles wide, engulfing everything within its path, visible over 250 miles away. After one minute the atomic mushroom cloud reached 47,000 feet high and 7 miles wide.? 5 ships were destroyed, numerous islanders were poisoned by the nuclear fallout, and a whole island was gouged out of existence as a crater 2km wide and 250 feet deep was burned into the earth. It was the 15 megaton 1952 ‘Castle Bravo’ atomic bomb test on Bikini atoll in the Marshall …