When viewed from above, much of the landscape of South Carolina is clearly covered in mysterious oval depressions that aren’t obvious from ground level. Known as “Carolina Bays”, nobody really knows how these unique geological features were formed.

Despite their name, Carolina Bays can also be found in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, and northcentral Florida. They vary in size from one to several thousand acres, and are often gathered in groups. Many are filled with water and named as lakes, but most contain vegetated wetland.

Most striking however, is that every single one is invariably aligned in almost exactly same direction - which has led some people to claim that they might be the result of a meteor impact. It would have to have been a pretty serious impact, as there are estimated to be over 500,000 of them. This is Lake Waccamaw, north Carolina, which is widely considered the largest Carolina bay.

George Howard (a bit of a Carolina Bay fanatic), has created an exhaustive KML file that marks the location of many thousands of the bays in North Carolina. This image was taken in Google Earth, and shows the white outlines that have been used to mark the locations.

So, who here can solve the mystery of the Carolina Bays?

You can read more about Carolina Bays at Wikipedia. Thanks to Keith Wright, david and Ogle Earth.

The newly released Google Earth Web Plugin allows you to access the 3D globe of Google Earth, right within your browser.

You can give it a go right now as we’ve enabled the Google Earth mode on our map page¹. Let us know how you get on in the comments.

You can read more about the announcement on O’reilly and Google Earth Blog.

The town of Holbrook, Australia, is notable as home to the only set of traffic lights between Sydney and Melbourne. Slightly more interesting though is that here, 160 miles inland we can plainly see a full-size submarine.

Originally this place was known as Germantown (a name that didn’t sit too well during WWI), so they chose the new name to honour Lieutenant Norman Douglas Holbrook, a British submarine captain who had been awarded the highest military decoration, the Victoria Cross.

80 years later the town was gifted the stern section of the HMAS Otway, an ex-Royal Australian Navy submarine. Despite Lt. Holbrook not having had anything to do with this particular submarine, the residents had by now fallen in love with all things submarine, and subsequently tried to raise funds to purchase the rest of the decommissioned vessel.

Unfortunately, even with a large donation from Holbrook’s widow, they only raised enough cash to purchase the top half, which is what we see protruding from the ground here.

Read more on the sub over at Wikipedia and see ground level pictures on Flickr.

Thanks to Simon Burgess.

Hidden away in the forests of western Russia, is a highly suspicious-looking collection of buildings which have never been place-marked by the Google Earth Community, and don’t seem to have ever been mentioned on the web.

The buildings are all exactly the same size (around 30m long), are identically spaced, and point in an identical direction. They’re likely to be impossible to see from the ground due to the dense forest, but the perimeter is marked by a road all the way round. Some of the buildings are missing however - several appear to have recently collapsed, and others have become completely overgrown.

There’s a small branch railway that services this place from a depot in the nearest village, Semrino, and the nearest village with a Russian Wikipedia page is Susanin, just to the south. None of this information turned up any answers unfortunately.

Alexei, our multi-lingual author of Google Sightseeing Italiano who also speaks Russian, investigated further and turned up this contact page which describes the area as an active army “reserve” - which he says means a strategic reserve stock of food, arms or anything else that might be required in case of emergency…

Despite the general state of repair of the place, Alexei informs us that it’s still very much active and is under 24 hour armed surveillance!

Thanks to ilya and Alexei.

This post has been around the web several times already, but by popular demand, here’s the Street View sighting of a child pointing a gun at another child on the streets of Chicago.

In the next frame we can see that the “intended victim” is still standing, so maybe this was just a couple of kids playing with water pistols, but sooner or later Google will presumably let images of a terrible tragedy slip through into their mapping services.

See our Street View archive for more sights like this.

Originally via Streetviewfun, thanks to Scott, Marc James, Martyn and biauas.

Just outside Lisbon Airport we can see an old jet airliner. Nothing unusual about that, clearly - however you’d have to go a very long way to find another aircraft that has ever been converted into a strip bar, complete with DJ booth in the cockpit!¹

The aircraft is a relatively rare Convair 880 - there were originally 65 built, but today there are just 8 left in the world. Only one of these has been fully preserved: The Lisa Marie, which used to belong to Elvis Presley.

Unfortunately, you won’t be able to pay this historical location a visit, as just a few weeks ago the strip bar was closed down and the plane destroyed.

So there’s only 7 now.

Thanks to Frank.

Completely unknown to the Western world until 1812, this is the ancient city of Petra in Jordan.

Although nobody knows for sure when people first settled here, the incredible architecture that survives is thought to be at least 2,000 years old - and the most impressive thing is that much of what remains wasn’t built, but actually carved directly out of the sandstone cliffs - like this entire amphitheatre for example.

Ground level photo

Probably the best preserved part of the ancient city is Al Khazneh, or The Treasury, which is sheltered at the end of a tall, narrow gorge known as al-Siq. The shelter afforded by the high walls explains why the Treasury hasn’t been sandblasted away like many of Petra’s other architectural features.¹

Although the angle these images were taken at doesn’t allow us to see the façade itself, we can see a crowd milling around in front of it.

The Treasury is at the top of this thumbnail, and the pictures that the crowd are taking would look a lot like this.

If you’re thinking this place seems familiar, perhaps you recognise it from 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in which it played a part as the fictional “Temple of the Holy Grail”.²

If you’d like to explore more, here’s a good map of all the local sights, or read Petra’s Wikipedia page.

Thanks to Jason Griswold and Dan Kuck.

The Langkawi Sky Bridge perches precariously over a spectacular chasm, 700m above sea level on Pulau Langkawi, an island within Malaysia’s Langkawi archipelago of 99 distinct islands¹.

Incredibly, the cable-stayed bridge actually curves 125m around a single support, sweeping out dramatically over the vast emptiness below.

Acrophobics should probably avoid watching this wonderfully terrifying Youtube video, and gephyrophobiacs definitely won’t enjoy these stunning bridge-level photos…

Thanks to Rusbridge.