The island of Gotland is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Sweden, and is also home to the Gotland Ring, a motorsports racetrack carved into an old limestone quarry which, once finished, will be the longest racetrack on Earth.

Today about 3km of the Northern loop are currently in use¹, but around 7km will be ready by next year. As well as the track itself, Google’s images let us see the absolutely massive wind turbines that form part of the operator’s vision to be the most environmentally friendly racing facility of its type in the world.

Although it’s far from complete at this stage, these images do also let us begin to see the profile of the Southern Loop, which will apparently be ready for “tarmac installation” next year, but won’t be ready for racing until 2012. As this diagram demonstrates, when finished the two loops will be joined, allowing drivers to race around one complete circuit totalling 28km.²

The land on which the track is being built belongs to a company called Nordkalk, and as the imagery makes quite obvious, it used to be a large limestone quarry. It looks like production of limestone is still in full flow here, judging by the activity going on at the nearby lake, and in fact much of the crushed stone needed for building the circuit was provided by the mining operation.

Gotland Ring does have a Wikipedia page, but it currently reads like a badly translated press release. Perhaps a kindly Swede could do a better job of translating the key points from the official site?

Clipperton Island, one of the most remote land masses on earth, is an uninhabited coral atoll under French authority, located in the Eastern Pacific Ocean approximately 1,120 kilometres south west of Mexico.

The island was named for John Clipperton, an English pirate who visited the island briefly in the 18th century and may have used it to hide treasure… which so far has never been found!¹

12 kilometres in diameter, the ring-shaped island completely encloses a stagnant freshwater lagoon with many deep basins. One of these, known as “the bottomless hole,” contains an extremely high concentration of sulphuric acid, making Clipperton a less than desirable vacation destination.

Add to that a severe lack of fresh water and an abundance of poisonous land crabs – and Clipperton Island shapes up to be the perfect location for an evil super-villain’s island fortress of doom!

Though uninhabited today, at its peak around 1914 Clipperton was home to a group of 100 men, women and children, and was the site of a booming guano-mining² operation.

Only three years later, only 10 women and children remained – thanks to a lack of supplies and a homicidal lighthouse keeper. Since then the island has only been visited periodically by French military patrols and the occasional scientific expedition.

Yesterday¹ was Australia Day, when each January 26th, Australians crack open some beers and toss another shrimp on the barbie to celebrate their arrival on the world’s smallest continent all the way back in 1788.

Australia has many wonderful things to celebrate, not least in being the location for the claimed best job in the world, which is a post that requires the successful applicant to take up residence on the tropical Hamilton Island, off the Queensland coast.

The job was offered a couple of weeks ago and the story quickly spread round the entire web², as it promises the winning applicant the role of “caretaker” – which basically amounts to a bit of blogging, feeding some fish, and collecting the island’s mail. No formal qualifications are required, but candidates must be willing to swim, snorkel, dive and sail.

For completing these duties, (which amount to 12 hours a month of actual “work”), the successful applicant will receive a salary of A$150,000 ($103,000, £70,000) for six months, and get to live rent-free in a three-bedroom villa, complete with pool.

It turns out that Hamilton Island is a lot more densely populated³ than the promotional materials would have you believe – meaning that we weren’t able to determine which is the actual villa where the successful applicant will reside – but there’s loads of nice ones to choose from. Infinity pool anyone?

Hamilton Island is the second largest inhabited island of the Whitsunday Islands, and is in fact dedicated almost exclusively to tourism. Anybody fancy some go-karting?

There’s lots of other islands to explore here, including Dent Island where they’re building a golf course, or Whitsunday Island, where on Whitehaven beach we find a couple of seaplanes, a beach party and… is that a helicopter?

Also worth mentioning is Hayman Island, which is home to a resort built by Reg Ansett, which features its own harbor and several helipads. Of course, there are at least 3 swimming pools and even a recursive pool-in-a-pool (on an island).

If you’re thinking that the Whitsunday Islands might be a good place to spend a few months, then you’ve got until the 22nd of February to apply.

Thanks to our Austrian (no, I’ve not misspelled that) correspondent, Al Cohole.

This huge pavilion and dance hall is the only remaining structure from Boblo Island Amusement Park in Ontario.

The Amusement Park was open to the public from 1898 until 1993 and through the years it was home to a number of roller coasters, rides, shows and restaurants. The remaining dance hall is about 3300 square metres and for a while had the largest dance floor in the world.

Most visitors reached the island (also known as Bois Blanc) by ferry from Detroit, leading to perhaps the most historically significant development related to the park. In 1948 a US Supreme Court decision upheld the Michigan law preventing corporations from racial discrimination, however the ferry company tried to deny African-Americans passage as the island destination was foreign. The Court eventually decided it was not ‘very foreign’, being socially and economically closely tied to Michigan, and having no ties to nearby Ontario communities.

A comprehensive history of the park can be found here. Today the island is being developed with luxury housing, a golf course and a marina.

Just to the West of the island is the tree-lined Livingstone Shipping Channel.

The channel was cut through shallow water to provide a safe route for ship traffic heading south to Lake Erie.

Thanks to Kirk Hayhurst who submitted this fairly regularly for the last couple of years!

Taal Volcano is another active stratovolcano, this time on the island of Luzon in the Philippines, and at only 406 metres, it is known as the world’s smallest volcano.

Actually Taal’s crater has a lake in it… sadly the high-res imagery here didn’t quite cover the crater lake, but this aerial photograph reveals that in the crater lake itself actually contains a tiny little island – which is no less than the world’s largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island!

See our post from last year’s Island Week 2 for loads more crazy island/lake recursion.

(Wikipedia)