Nestled in the Lancashire countryside, just to the south of Ormskirk, is the small town of Argleton. Or so Google would have us believe.

Zooming in closer reveals that Argleton isn’t exactly a bustling metropolis. In fact it looks suspiciously like a couple of fields.

Roy Bayfield of Ormskirk was so intrigued by the mystery that he walked to the centre of Argleton just to check that there was definitely nothing there. There really wasn’t.

So where has Argleton come from? Some of Aughton’s 8,300 residents believe that it’s the result of a simple mispronunciation, but conspiracists have suggested another theory.

The map data used here comes from Tele Atlas, and it has long been known that cartographers sometimes alter their maps as a way of protecting their intellectual copyrights. Usually this takes the form of Trap Streets (which are designed to “trap” people who steal the data, as they copy the unique mistakes along with everything else), however in this case, is it possible that Tele Atlas has invented an entire town?

In the past the inclusion of a fake town in a map would have likely caused no harm, but in the age of automatic content generation, Argleton was building up a fair bit of fake history.¹ Simply by having been declared to exist, automatic listings were being generated for it, meaning that is someone were to look it up online, they would believe it to be a lively town with jobs, hotels and schools.

Of course one final possibility remains – that Argleton is simply a mistake. Consider the fact that just a few kilometres to the north, Google has quite brilliantly renamed a local cul-de-sac to Dummy 1325.

Thanks to Google Maps Mania for alerting us to this one, which was originally posted by Mike Nolan at the Edge Hill University.

It’s been a while since we featured a giant geoglyph, so it was with great pleasure that we learned of Australia’s Bunjil geoglyph at the You Yangs National Park in Victoria.

“You Yangs” is a derivation of the Aboriginal words meaning “big mountain in the middle of a plain”, and sculptor Andrew Rogers chose this location for his giant avian-figure as a homage to the indigenous Wautharong Aborigines, who lived on these lands for tens of thousands of years.

The bird is “Bunjil”, the Wautharong’s sky god, and has a huge 100m wing span, formed from piles of over 1500 tonnes of rock.

Andrew Rogers is currently involved in his massive “Rhythms of Life” project, which is the largest contemporary land-art undertaking in the world. The plan is to create a chain of stone sculptures like this one, all around the globe – a project involving over 5,000 people on five continents.

We’ll be taking a look at some of Andrew Rogers’ other works in the coming weeks, so leave a comment if you know of one that has coverage that you think we should post!

See more geoglyphs featured on Google Sightseeing.

Thanks to neotrix.

It’s Island Week 4 here at GSS, which means we’ll mostly be posting about Islands. For about a week.

On September 29, 2009, just south of the islands that make up the Independent State of Samoa in Polynesia, an earthquake measuring 8.0 on the Moment Magnitude scale occurred, which generated a tsunami that swept across the nearby islands killing at least 149 people.

Most of the victims were on Samoa itself, where reports of a wave between 3 and 10 metres have emerged. Many low-lying areas in the Samoan islands have been completely destroyed, including the Prime Minister’s home village of Lepa.

Several other Polynesian islands were affected including the Unincorporated U.S. Territory of American Samoa to the east, where they lost at least 25 people, and to the south Tonga, where 6 people are so far known to have died.

Just 16 hours after the Samoan tsunami, another large earthquake occurred just off the southern coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. This eruption registered a lower moment magnitude reading of 7.6, but even without a tsunami has still claimed at least 1,100 lives.

Separated by 9,749 km, these two earthquakes were unrelated. They also lie on separate faults; Samoa sits just north of the Tonga Trench, and Sumatra is located on one of the world’s most active fault lines, the Great Sumatran fault.

What the two earthquakes do share however, is that all the affected islands fall within the Pacific Ring of Fire, a 40,000 km long horseshoe-shaped region that is defined by a nearly continuous path of volcanic features, including 452 volcanoes. 75% of the world’s active and dormant volcanoes are located within the region, and together they are responsible for about 90% of the world’s earthquakes.

More information is available at Wikipedia about the 2009 Samoa earthquake, the 2009 Padang earthquake, and the Pacific Ring of Fire.

8 years ago today, on 21 September 2001, a huge explosion occurred in the AZF (AZote Fertilisant – nitrogen fertiliser) factory in Toulouse, France. Three hundred tonnes of ammonium nitrates blew up, creating a 200 m wide crater up to 30 m deep.

Steel girders were found 3 km away from the explosion, which itself was heard 80 km away (50 miles).

29 people died as a direct result of the incident, and over 10,000 people were injured – many thousands by the flying glass from the two thirds of the city’s windows that were shattered. Around 40,000 people were also made homeless for several days.

The official enquiry stated that the ammonium nitrate had exploded following “improper handling”, but there were unconfirmed rumours at the time that suggested that this tragedy was actually the result of a terrorist attack.

Just to the east of the crater is a large pixelated area. The Street View imagery isn’t pixellated though, and shows gives a fairly clear view of a factory. I wonder what it is?

There’s more information and theories available at Wikipedia.

Thanks to @KeirClarke.

In Indiana, the local farmers have an apparently long tradition of decorating the roofs of their barns with interesting pictures. I haven’t been able to find much information on the historical reasons why they do this, but the steeply angled roofs mean that the images are pretty clearly visible from ground level – so presumably they make for fairly good advertising hoardings.

There are tons of these decorated roofs all over the Midwestern United States, but today we’ll be limiting ourselves to ones found in Indiana, because otherwise we’d be here forever.

Based purely on the number of roofs that depict cows, I’m going to guess that there are a lot of dairy farmers in Indiana. They’re also pretty big on pigs too.

The number of properties featuring horses is pretty impressive, but there are probably even more depictions of a more modern type of workhorse, the tractor.

You know, I think I’m starting to see some common themes here. Is anyone else getting a farmyard vibe? Oh look, another tractor. Except this time, it says “MAKIN BACON”! Cool.

People do seem to have eventually started to get slightly more adventurous however, as these two roofs demonstrate through their use of “scenery”.

Of course there are occasional properties where the owners have promoted some different species, such as ducks, chickens, and deer.

Actually that’s not all, mustn’t forget the multi-coloured llamas.

It seems that some people have recognised that there isn’t much original work happening in the Indiana roof-art scene, which may explain this excellent bit of Disney copyright infringement.

Presumably this next one was also created in the name of art – unless they really do breed Unicorns round these parts?

For more roof art than you could possibly imagine, check out Ohio Barns.com. Thanks to Adriano and Felippo.

Previously on Google Sightseeing: Happy Magic Rainbow Unicorn.