Inspired by some posters I’ve seen recently advertising a rival mapping service, here’s the Rio-Antirio bridge which spans the Gulf of Corinth in Greece, which has the world’s longest cable-stayed suspended deck. It was completed in 2004 but is still under construction in these images. (Update: Turns out the bridge in the poster is actually the Vasco da Gama bridge in Lisbon, whoops! Thanks Geoff.)

Due to the movement of tectonic plates, the distance between land here is increasing at a rate of 30 mm per year. To accomodate this, the piers of the bridge are designed to slide, accomodating any expansion of the Gulf within the bridge’s lifetime.

There’s more at the WIkipedia page and at the official site, neither of which seem to be able to decide how to spell Rio[n]-Antir[r]io[n].

Thanks to Abigail Brady, Will, Bertrand Capo, dustin, Igor and Pille.

I realise we’ve had quite a few volcanoes this week, but you guys keep submitting them, so here’s just one more. This is the Mount Bromo in the Tenggar caldera, Indonesia, which I think looks fantastic with just one solitary puff of smoke leaking from the crater.

Slightly to the north there’s a lake (which could be an old volcano itself I suppose) which has an odd collection of grid-like objects floating on it. Answers on a postcard please…

Thanks to Arthur van Leeuwen, blouet, Asprine, Alastair Dodd and Tggb3k.

Crikey, it seems there’s been some sort of serious traffic accident here in Baghdad. I wonder what happened?

Whatever happened, given the state of the traffic, I can’t say I’m that surprised… :-/ That isn’t an isolated example eiter – the traffic’s like that all over the place!

Scary stuff.

Thanks to Marco Olivo, Gydo Matthijssen, Bleij and rob.

Well that’s all the volcanoes I’m posting today, but if any of this has sparked an interest in things of a geological nature, then despair not. Over at Google Earth Blog you can find out how to pinpoint virtually every volcano on our planet in Google Earth – which I thoroughly recommend trying it out as (apart from the wealth of information included), all of these volcanoes look absolutely awesome in 3D

Furthermore, with today’s Maps update, many of the volcanoes we’ve linked to over the last year are now covered by high-resolution imagery, including Mount Hood, Pacaya, Barcena, Ilamatepec and Hawaii!

This latest update is seriously awesome, so get exploring, and send us your sights!

Thanks to the brand new image update, Google maps’ satellite imagery now covers the Spanish island of Lanzarote in glorious high-resolution imagery – just in time to make this year’s volcano day! Lanzarote is a volcanic island which consists of literally hundreds of volcanoes – far too many for me to point them all out, but here’s some highlights:

Make sure you do scroll around to get a proper feel for the place though. You could even drop by the the tourist trap to watch guides throwing branches into the ground to be set alight by the heat below the surface!

Wait. That was when I was actually there, and not something I saw in these images….

I was on Lanzarote years ago for a family holiday, which seems strange now as the place should probably be nearly inhospitable – a quarter of the island’s surface is covered by lava, of 213 km of coastline only 10 km are sand (much of which I seem to remember was black), and every year the island is whipped by sandstorms which arrive from Africa carrying Saharan sands!

However this does mean that Lanzarote is pretty much the place to go for wind and kite surfing.

Thanks to Amio cajander and Jedi Master Kalimero.