Check out these bizarre circles of farmland smack-bang in the middle of the Libyan desert. This unlikely-seeming sight has been made possible by the construction of the Great Man Made River, possibly the largest water transport system ever built, consisting of a network of pipes buried underground, each four meters in diameter. In the 1960s, efforts to find oil in southern Libya led to the discovery of huge quantities of fresh water underground, and today the Great Man Made River carries more than five million cubic metres of that water under the desert, vastly increasing the amount of arable land.

However, I’m told that apparently these sources of water (which were deposited in the ice age) are only likely to last between 50 and 100 years, yet the project is estimated to have cost 25 billion US dollars.

There’s lots more of these circles around to support this theory, but does anyone else think what they’re actually doing is trying to draw a picture of a giant dog?

Thanks to Tom Beddard, Stuart McGlashan, Steve Rot, pixiecrinkle, Mark and Phillip.

This is the ancient city of Teotihuacán, Mexico. Construction of the city began around 300 BC, with the Pyramid of the Sun (shown in our thumbnail) finished by 150 BC. The Pyramid of the sun sits in front of the Avenue of the Dead, and at the North end of that you can see the Pyramid of the Moon. The enormous cultural influence of the city reached its peak around 150-450 AD, when its population is believed to have been over 150,000. Pretty big for nearly 2,000 years ago!

As usual there’s more great info at Wikipedia, and this site has a good map of the city and lots more information too.

Thanks to Sven, R.Dubber, PikaPikaChick, Eduardo Cardenas Trejo, jupap7, Scott Baptista & Ericson Canavan, Jim Morton, DarrenW, Hermann Withalm, Dennis, William Melody and finally Rednapx.

Gibraltar is an overseas territory of the United Kingdom on the southern tip of Spain. I visited Gibraltar while on a Spanish holiday a few years back and, just like the rest of the UK, it rained a lot.

We’ll start today’s tour (hopefully rain free) with the famous Gibraltar rock and the monkeys that live there. The Barbary Apes live in a cave near the Charles V Wall and tourists can walk up the rock to see the monkeys. Most of the paths up the rock are off-limits to the public but from the satellite viewpoint we can see on top of the rock there are various look out points with gun batteries.

A fair amount of Gibraltar is built on reclaimed land and the lack of space is apparent when you look at Gibraltar’s only airstrip. Stretching the full width of the land (and plus some) it even intersects a road. At either side you can see a few cars waiting for the runway to be clear. Lastly on our little tour we visit the the most southerly point of Gibraltar where you can see Europa Point Lighthouse.

Thanks: Carson Diltz, Caius Toneriko, Keith T., damian, Rob, Jan Brasna, David de Hora, Teseo, Daniel