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Google Sightseeing takes you on tour of the world as seen from satellite, using the free Google Earth program, or Google Maps in your web browser. Each weekday your guides James and Alex present new weird and wonderful sights as suggested by readers.

The editors: James & Alex

The Longest Conveyor Belt in the World

Tuesday, 15th August 2006 by Alex

Guess where The Longest Conveyor Belt in the World is? Western Sahara of course.

(More than half of the conveyor is in high-res, but the particularly cool section shown here has been captured in super high-res as part of the National Geographic Megaflyover project.)

The conveyor is 100 kilometres long and runs all the way to the coast from the phosphate mines of Bu Craa (which sounds a lot like a George Lucas place name to me).

If we zoom quite far out (to help grasp the scale of this massive machine) it looks distinctly like a lot of phosphate has been lost to the Saharan winds…

Thanks: Carlos Vlc.

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Locations: Western Sahara / Categories:

5 Responses to 'The Longest Conveyor Belt in the World'

  1. 1. Pedro Pinheiro says: August 15th, 2006 at 3:19 pm

    The start of the conveyor belt, at the mines, is also at high-res, and pretty interesting - Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth - and I found some ground photos of a different but similar installation - http://www.mining-technology.com/projects/benguearir/benguearir7.html

    There is also the wikipedia article about Bou Craa - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bou_Craa

    The conveyor belt was installed by Krupp, and it’s comprised of 11 separate sections.

  2. 2. Joshua says: August 15th, 2006 at 3:55 pm

    Then do you suppose all of this is broken pieces of the belt? Maybe damaged during one of the 1970’s attacks? hmmm

  3. 3. Timtom says: August 17th, 2006 at 3:09 pm

    I found some (old) ground photos of the Bu Craa mines:
    http://www.sahara-mili.net/lugar/bucraa.htm (looks like they are dating from the pre-1975 time, when the region was still under spanish control)

  4. 4. Timtom says: August 17th, 2006 at 3:11 pm

    And here as well http://www.lasonet.com/sahara/sh-10.htm (lots of pictures from the spanish times, but navigation is not easy)

  5. 5. Michael says: September 29th, 2006 at 9:45 pm

    there are many places around Sahara that sound like Star Wars locations, especially around this area: Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth
    (not by chance, of course…)

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