In 1998, the tiny truck-stop village of Ilakaka in Madagascar was transformed into a bustling mining town, and one of the most dangerous places in the country. The reason for this dramatic change was the discovery of massive sapphire deposits in the valley.

Browsing the area from above you can see thousands of small mine holes randomly peppered across the landscape. With no official control on the mining the holes are often dug by just one or two people hoping to make a quick fortune from the sapphires in the sand deep below.

As word of the town’s riches spread, larger organisations moved in and you can spot the larger pits by the stepped sand walls. It is now estimated that 50% of the world’s sapphires come from this one town.

Thanks to The Big Picture which have their usual fantastic collection of photos.

When Google recently added street view for vast stretches of empty road across the middle of Australia, most people didn’t expect to find much of interest out there.

To be fair, those people were mostly right. However, every now and again the street view car did indeed pass something at least. In the deserts of South Australia on the Stuart Highway, we can see an approaching truck. Actually, it’s a really big truck!

Hang on, is that another truck driving dangerously close behind the first one? Nope, the first massive truck is actually pulling another trailer which carries… another truck – followed by another trailer!

The sign on the back of the huge vehicle kindly explains that this is a “ROAD TRAIN” – a kind of trucking used in remote areas of Australia, the United States, and Western Canada to move huge loads across vast distances. In the U.S. and Canada the terms “triples,” “Turnpike doubles” and “Rocky Mountain doubles” are more commonly used.

This particular road train is a “triple”, and is also “doubled-up” (carrying empty road train trailers), but some of these vehicles pull up to 4 trailers at a time. Australia has the largest and heaviest road-legal vehicles in the world, with some weighing up to 200 tonnes.

Previously on Google Sightseeing: Trucks Pulling Trucks

Thanks to Virtual Globe Trotting

Within the Sonoran Desert National Monument, Arizona, is one of the largest stockpiles of discarded vehicle tyres¹ in the US – perhaps as many as 10 million individual tyres.

Despite being just south of a town called Goodyear, this is actually the work of a company called Envirotech Industries International, who have been collecting tyres here for the last 10 years.

The company used to recycle the tyres, and intended to start converting the old tyres into fuel – until the state of Arizona closed them down for multiple serious fire-code violations. Envirotech subsequently went bankrupt, leaving the State of Arizona responsible for the facility.

The imagery at Microsoft’s Live service has better resolution, allowing us to see individual tyres that have fallen from the huge piles (one of the breaches of the fire regulations was “Obstructed fire roads”).

If a fire were to break out here, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office have stated that it could “burn unhindered for over ten years”. To put that into perspective, in 1999 it took 250 firefighters 5 days to get a fire at a facility in Ohio under control – and it took a further nine years and more than $32 million to clean up the mess.

There are an estimated 3 billion waste tires stockpiled in the United States, and when they catch fire the environmental fallout can be catastrophic. Government reports stated that the pollution from the 1999 Ohio fire killed more than 10,000 fish in a nearby creek.

The Sonoran Desert National Monument is a small part of the 311,000 km² Sonoran Desert – home to several endangered species, and the most biologically diverse of all the North American deserts.

Read the full story at azcentral.com.

Thanks to kjfitz.

And so, we come to end of our first ever desert week. It turns out that we only featured two actual deserts over the week, and we even failed to mention the world’s largest desert!

Despite these we think it’s been a success, but we’d to hear your feedback. Did you enjoy desert week? Do you wish it had been longer, or perhaps shorter? Are there any other theme weeks you’d like to see? Let us know your thoughts!

Here’s the list of all the places we featured this week:

• The Namib Desert
• Sand Tornado
• The Great Dune of Pyla
• The Desert of Maine
• The Atacama Desert

Many of you sent in some great desert based suggestions of other sights to see, but we just didn’t have enough time to feature them all. However, deserts aren’t restricted to desert week, so we may sneak a few in during the coming months.

We’re also planning for August to see the return of the popular Island Week for its third outing, and after that Volcano Day is due to make its triumphant return after a 2 year hiatus, and this time it’s going to make the jump to a fully-blown Volcano Week. Know of any great sights for either event? Then get submitting your suggestions!

We’re continuing the first annual GSS Desert Week! We’re mostly posting about deserts and it’s lasting about a week!

The Atacama Desert is a virtually rainless plateau in Chile, South America. Made up of salt basins, sand and lava flows, the 181,300 km² desert is more than 20 million years old, and as it only receives about 3mm of rain a year is considered to be one of the driest places on Earth. Areas such as the Valle de la Luna haven’t received a single drop of rain in hundreds of years.

Valle de la Luna (Wikipedia) shown bottom left of this image (Ground level photo)

This bizarre landscape isn’t completely devoid of life however. To the east of the Valle de la Luna lies the village of San Pedro de Atacama, which has developed in the middle of the desert thanks to an oasis. People have been living here for a very long time – the ruins at Aldea de Tulor date from 800 BC.¹

Aldea de Tulor (Ground level photo)

The Atacama Desert is incredibly rich in copper, and the two largest copper mines in the world, Chuquicamata and Escondida are both here. Escondida alone produced 1.483 million tons of copper in 2007 – 9.5% of the entire world’s output.

Chuquicamata (Wikipedia) and Escondida (Wikipedia) copper mines

Mining here hasn’t always been so successful however – the Atacama Desert is littered with the ruins of 170 old abandoned nitrate (or “saltpeter”) mining towns, all of which (bar one) were shut down after the Germans invented synthetic nitrate at the turn of the 20th century.

The most important of these abandoned mines is the Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter Works, and it has actually been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Thanks to the extremely arid conditions, cloud cover is incredibly rare in the Atacama desert. Combined with the high elevation of the area, that makes it a perfect location for stargazing, which is why there are several observatories here, including at 2,635 metres the Paranal Observatory, that houses the utterly brilliantly named Very Large Telescope (Wikipedia).

Thanks to Bakan_Vargas, Bleij and Tom (and Chris Branagan too).