Comments on: Grande Dixence Dam

By: Myagooshki

Myagooshki — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 20:00:08 +0000

yes the biggest dam is in paraguay.

25°24′30.71″S
54°35′29.82″W

There you go. Its about 63 miles long. No joke.

By: Myagooshki

Myagooshki — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 19:45:03 +0000

Well if u put the view down to eye level the between the mountains and everything view looks freaking awesome.
Im gonna look for a bigger dam though, I i find one, I will have a new post with it on.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 04:55:24 +0000

Great Picture!

By: Zee

Zee — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 22:52:55 +0000

Also the dam we see wasn’t completed until 1965. Completed in 1935 was the first dam seen when the water is low. Quotith wikipedia
===
The first Grande Dixence Dam was constructed between 1929 and 1935. A second dam that would flood the first was built between 1951 and 1965, and was filled on July 17, 1957. The first dam can still be seen when the water level is particularly low.
===
Here’s a photo showing the second and first dam during winter.
http://www.swissdams.ch/Committee/history/images/2_Grande%20Dixence%20600.jpg

By: ajho

ajho — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 22:26:50 +0000

Nothing wrong with the colour of the water. here’s a photo I took last summer on Lake Brienz (Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth). It’s the fine limestone mud washed down by the glacial melt waters that does it,

By: gary

gary — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 16:37:35 +0000

Alex I just went to Wikipedia and entered dam. went to the bottom of the entry and there is a link to the tallest dams. Thats where I got the info.

By: DJA

DJA — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 15:23:55 +0000

From Guinness World Records 2008!

The Nurek dam, on the river Vakhsh, Tajikistan, is 300 m (984) high and was completed in 1980.

It also says that the Rogunskaya dam would have been the tallest in world, had it been completed. But it wasn’t due to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

By: Alex

Alex — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 12:46:56 +0000

Gary - from what I can discover on the net in the light of your claim, it seems that you are at least partially correct.

MSN Encarta lists the following dams in the top 3 spots:

1. Rogun (Tajikistan), 335 metres, 1990
2. Nurek (Tajikistan), 300 metres, 1980
3. Grande Dixence (Switzerland), 284 metres, 1962

While Wikipedia’s page on the Nurek Dam states that:

The Rogun Dam, under construction along the Vakhsh also in Tajikistan, is expected to exceed the Nurek when completed

Which means that if Wikipedia are right, and the Rogun dam is still incomplete, that currently the tallest dam in the world is actually the Nurek.

I will check my copy of the Guinness book when I get home tonight, and update the post accordingly! Thanks.

By: Jel

Jel — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 11:30:26 +0000

Not just Guru Meditation, I was informed by the system that it was an error talking to backend. Friday afternoon philosophy of the highest water…

By: Chris W

Chris W — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 08:05:30 +0000

@Personal: the images for most of Switzerland have this odd coloring. The data comes via a company who run map.search.ch. That site had reasonably high-res’ images for all of Switzerland way before Google did. It appears that when Google set up a new European HQ in Zurich, they didn’t want to be out-done, so they acquired the company, and integrated their images into the ones that Google already had for Switzerland (see this post on englishforum.ch). Unfortunately, the images are quite old (probably late 1990’s), and are not as high-res as the regular Google high-res, but it beats what they had before by a long shot.