This is the second in an occasional series where we’ll be travelling to some of the world’s most interesting abandoned places.

Fuelled by the ancient myth of the lost continent of Atlantis, underwater cities have always been the subject of much fascination.

Of course in real life small towns and villages are sometimes subsumed beneath changing bodies of water, but somewhat surprisingly, Google’s imagery has managed to capture at least three underwater towns which were all handily above water at the time.¹

St. Thomas, Nevada

Back in 1871, the small town of St. Thomas, Nevada (Wikipedia) was first abandoned by the Mormons, after a shift in the state line severely altered their tax liability.

The people who claimed the empty properties would eventually be forced to leave themselves, thanks to the construction of the Hoover Dam and the creation of Lake Mead, which even today is the largest man-made lake and reservoir in the United States.

The Hoover Dam was completed in 1935, and just three years later the last resident of St. Thomas was forced to leave by the rising waters of Lake Mead. Here we can still see the outline of the town’s school, which like several other properties becomes visible when the reservoir is low.

Adaminaby, Australia

Adaminaby (Wikipedia) is a town near Australia’s Snowy Mountains, New South Wales, which has the distinction of being one of the highest towns in Australia², and a very popular place from which to take fishing trips to nearby Lake Eucumbene.

On Street View we can see The Big Trout that graces the town centre in recognition of fishing’s importance here.

This is strange though, as it was the creation of Lake Eucumbene that forced all of the residents to have to abandon the original town…

In April 2007 the ongoing drought³ in this region brought the water level so low that Old Adaminaby began to re-appear, 50 years after it had been flooded as part of the Snowy Mountains Scheme hydro-electricity project.

Unfortunately the structures themselves are only faintly visible from up here, but elsewhere on the shores are other more prominent ruins that are also becoming exposed.

(Try turning on the photos option on Google Maps to see lots of great ground-level photos from the Panaramio Google Earth layer.)

Epecuén, Argentina

In contrast to these tales of towns being submerged in the name of progress, sometimes nature just takes its course. From about 1920 the water level of Argentina’s lake Epecuén rose steadily, and in 1978 the locals put earth and stone defences in place to try and protect their village.

These defences held back the water until November 10th 1985, when it finally broke through and flooded the village four metres deep. Here we can see the various buildings jutting from the surface of the lake.

Judging by the number of photographs available online, it seems that Epecuén is a popular destination for photographers, so there’s loads of ground-level photo sets to see – including this rather nice one on Flickr.

Thanks to Claude Warren and kjfitz.

This is the first in an occasional series where we’ll be looking at some of the world’s most interesting abandoned places.

In 1908, diamonds were discovered in the Namib Desert, and one of the towns that sprang up to provide shelter and entertainment for the influx of miners was Kolmanskop.

Modelled on a German town, at its height it boasted a hospital, ballroom, power station, school, skittle-alley, theatre and casino and railway line.

10 years later the end of World War I saw a huge drop in diamond prices, which heralded the beginning of the end for Kolmanskop. In 1936 larger deposits of more valuable diamonds were found near the coast, and the miners began to leave for the newly founded town of Oranjemund.

By the 1950s Kolmanskop was completely deserted, and the sweeping desert sand began to reclaim the town, wearing down the buildings and filling them slowly with sand.

More recently, Kolmanskop has been featured in movies, and today it’s a popular tourist destination run by the De Beers diamond company. It has been extensively documented by the photographers of Flickr, and has even inspired whole albums.

There’s more about Kolmanskop and Oranjemund on Wikipedia.

Thanks to Phillip Lockwood-Holmes.

In 1962, a landfill site in Centralia, Pennsylvania was set on fire. The rubbish was located in the pit of an abandoned strip mine, and although it was believed to have been extinguished at the time, the fire actually remained burning in the lower depths and eventually spread to an eight-mile seam of coal, where it has now been burning for 46 years.

Initial attempts to extinguish the fire were unsuccessful, and it continued to burn throughout the 1960s and 1970s. It soon became apparent that carbon monoxide produced by the blaze was having adverse effects upon the health of the locals, but it wasn’t until 1979 that people became aware of the scale of the problem:

a gas-station owner inserted a stick into one of his underground tanks to check the fuel level. When he withdrew it, it seemed hot, so he lowered a thermometer down on a string and was shocked to discover that the temperature of the gasoline in the tank was 77.8°C (172°F).

A couple of years later a 12-year-old boy fell into a 45 metre-deep sinkhole that suddenly opened beneath his feet, and people began to leave this place in earnest. Centralia’s population dwindled from over 1,000 residents in 1981 to just 9 in 2007. Today, all buildings within the borough have been condemned (you can see in the satellite shots that there are hardly any left now), and the few that remain lost their ZIP codes back in 2002.

To the south we can see a section of Pennsylvania Route 61 which had to be abandoned when, despite repeated repairs, huge smoking cracks kept appearing in the highway. We can see in Google’s imagery that today the road is becoming overgrown with plant-life, and yet the cracks in the earth still belch toxic smoke into the air here every day.

In 1994, this section of Route 61 was permanently closed, and we can easily see the road block which is used to direct traffic along Byrnesville Road instead.

As you read this post the underground fire continues to burn, and it is now estimated to underlie around 160 hectares (400 acres) of land.

Furthermore, it seems that this fire will continue to burn for some time to come; there are no current plans to extinguish it and the eight-mile coal seam constitutes enough fuel to last about 250 years.

Read more about Centralia at Wikipedia, explore a photo gallery of the area, or see some before and after shots of a previously inhabited area.

Thanks to George Dorn, greg, David, Rich Holmes, Sensei Sparky and Lars Christensen.