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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.

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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.

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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, weak undergound sewage lines can lead to sudden sink-holes in the middle of cities, open-pit mines strip the hearts out of mountains, nuclear weapons tests blast whole islands out of existence.  Here are 7 awe-inspiring examples of such enormous holes.

Craters, mines, lagoons, sink-holes.

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Nuclear Craters on the Marshall Islands

The impact is immediate and massive. In a second the fireball of flame, earth and smoke spreads almost four and half miles wide, engulfing everything within its path, visible over 250 miles away. After one minute the atomic mushroom cloud reaches 47,000 feet high and 7 miles wide. After 10 minutes it reached 40km high, expanding at more than 6 km per minute. 5 ships are destroyed, numerous islanders are poisoned by the nuclear fallout, a whole island is gouged out of existence as a crater 2km wide and 250 feet deep is burned into the earth.

It’s the 15 megaton 1952 ‘Castle Bravo’ atomic bomb test on Bikini atoll in the Marshall islands, 1200 times more powerful than the atmospheric bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1000 times more powerful than the Trinity test of 1945 that opened the floodgates to a nuclear world.

Now we live in that world.

Enewak atoll capped to contain the radioactivity, islanders take to their deck chairs to watch, the mushroom cloud rises.

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Airplane boneyard in the Mojave desert

This is where planes go when they die. Vast hulks of metal that cost millions to build, now grounded in obsolescence, taken out to the boneyard to be shot in the head like Old Yeller. Their long neat lines look a lot like the white tombs of fallen soldiers at Arlington cemetary, seemingly endless in number, white-grey blips on a terracotta field, waiting for the day the decision is made to hack them open like a sheet-metal pinata to get at the valuable guts within.

Fallen soldiers at a final roll call in the boneyard.

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Seoul’s ruined Jumbo Jet, the Juan T. Trippe

Last month I went to South Korea to visit with SY’s family and get a feel for her country; we stopped off briefly in Pusan before heading on to Seoul where we saw the War Museum, the N Seoul tower, Gyeongbok Palace, and the ruin of the Juan T. Trippe Pan Am Jumbo Jet. That last is hardly on the tourist trail, it doesn’t feature in any guidebooks or promotional brochures, but it’s a soon-to-be-removed aficionado’s delight, a Jumbo Jet that fell into ruin not once but twice, the story only getting more fascinating as the owner guided us through the slow ruin of its refurbished fuselage.

Nose cone of the Juan T. Trippe

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