This is the Salton Sea an inland ‘man-made’ salt-lake, located in Southern California. It usually covers a surface area of 974 square kilometres (although it varies a lot), making it the largest lake in California. It was formed in 1905 when heavy rainfall caused the Colorado River to breach a dike, and it took nearly two years to finally control the river’s flow into the Salton Sink and stop the flooding.

Bodies of water which have existed here in the past have always evaporated, but the Salton Sea is constantly replenished by runoff from surrounding agricultural communities, sustaining its water level. Water also flows into the lake at the New River delta, a river which originates 20 miles inside Mexico and consists entirely of wastewater discharged by nearly 1 million inhabitants of the rapidly growing Mexicali Valley.

Unfortunately this has all contributed to the Salton Sea becoming one of the most polluted lakes in the whole of the United States (there’s a rather grisly analysis of the situation here).

The high level of selenium in the water contributes to high mortality rates and birth defects in the local bird population, whilst algae starves the fish of oxygen, meaning that it’s not uncommon to see thousands of dead fish lining the shore.

All this has (unsurprisingly) taken it’s toll on tourism. Here’s Salton City, which was founded in the late 50s but failed to develop. You can see the layout of the roads (in fact in hybrid view you can see their names too), but there’s hardly any houses at all.

Weirdly, not too far away is an all-dirt, 9-hole golf course called The Sidewinder, that’s open all year round for free.

There’s loads and loads more information about this area available (as always) at Wikipedia.

Thanks: Cortney Moody, Jeff Alu, Ken Arnold, Pierre-Michel Ricordel

This is Hachiko Square, the famous “busy pedestrians” road junction in Tokyo where everyone is waiting patiently to cross the road and then surging over. On Google Maps it is the cross roads with the wide white stripes going around the square and one across the middle. It’s been in loads of films but most recently Lost In Translation, where Bill Murray and (the lovely) Scarlett Johanssen wandered around it.

Thanks Francois Jordaan.

Check out this little bit of pixelly weirdness down in Antarctica, not very high-resolution of course (there’s a lot of not-very-much to see down that way I believe), but it means we can finally have an Antarctica category!

Thanks to Winterfresh for sorting us out (And an additional, belated thanks to Dustin, hac and the very first person to submit this, Twombly). Sorry guys, will be more thorough next time!

Here is a great shot of Miyakejima Satsuma-Iwojima Island off the coast of Japan. It is volcanic in origin and the big volcano is Mount Oyama. This has erupted several times in recent history. A lava flow in 1940 killed 11 people, and other eruptions occurred in 1962 and 1983. In 2000, Mount Oyama began another series of eruptions and the island had to be evacuated. The residents were only allowed to return permanently in February, 2005! (I suck)

Thanks seamus & Tomoya (for the corrections).

There isn’t much high res imagery in North Korea but in the thin slice that is visible there is a wacking great river. I’ve counted no less than three hulking dams on this river. They certainly seem to like their hydro electricity. There was also that big explosion in North Korea last year that was blamed on them blasting half a mountain away, to build another dam.