The Oil Rocks, 50km off the coast of Azerbaijan, is effectively a small city that has been constructed from interconnected oil platforms and residential areas, all sitting atop rocks, piles of sand and landfill.

Back in 1949, the Oil Rocks were the site of the world’s first successful offshore venture in oil drilling, and by the 1960s 21 million tons of oil was being extracted each year.

Of course, this level of extraction couldn’t continue forever, and the quality and quantity of the oil started falling in the 80s. With it, the upkeep of the platforms and interconnecting roads fell, and today about a third of the oil wells are either inoperative or inaccessible, and many of the connecting roads have become submerged.

Despite the conditions, the platforms still have a combined population of about 5,000 men, who work in week-long offshore shifts, and collectively they produce over half of the total crude oil output of Azerbaijan.

Several action sequences in the 1999 James Bond film The World Is Not Enough are set and filmed on the Oil Rocks, where terrorists used a giant helicopter saw to cut the oil pipes. Obviously.

There’s a thorough history at window2baku.com, Wikipedia has a couple of choice facts, and there’s a photo of the interconnecting bridges at travel-images.com.

Update: What we’re seeing here is actually not the Oil Rocks, but is very close. Oil Rocks is further out to sea, unfortunately in an low res area. You can get an idea of how big Oil Rocks really is from the OpenAerialMap image.

Thanks to Samir Aliyev and Panda32 in the comments.

This is the brilliantly bizarre-looking National Aquatics Centre, which is better known as The Water Cube. The building is perhaps best described as resembling some sort of “bubble cake”, and when it’s lit up, it looks pretty incredible.

During the Beijing Olympics the centre will host the Swimming, Diving and Synchronised Swimming events, and is situated within Olympic Green, right next to the Bird’s Nest Stadium where the opening ceremony was held on Friday.¹

The design of the steel space-frame that makes up the building is actually based on a theory originally posited by great Victorian physicist Lord Kelvin. The idea was further developed in the 90s, and suggests that a combination of dodecahedra and tetrakaidecahedra (12 and 14-sided shapes respectively) can be used to divide space into cells of equal volume with the least surface area between them. In the case of the aquatic centre, thus maximising the amount of light entering the building, and helping to reduce the cost of heating the pool!

The frame is wrapped in a transparent form of Teflon called ETFE, and the building is the largest ETFE clad structure in the world – bigger even than the world’s largest greenhouse, the previously featured Eden Project. ETFE allows more light and heat penetration than traditional glass – apparently accounting for an equivalent 30% decrease in heating costs.

More about the National Aquatics Centre at Wikipedia, and an informative article about theoretical physics is available from The Guardian.

Such is the volume of new imagery that is added to Google Earth, that by the time we got around to posting the longest cross-sea bridge in the world, it had already been superseded.

Fortunately for us however, the current reigning champion was captured whilst still under construction, which means that we’re able to bring you the longest cross-sea bridge on Google Earth, China’s Donghai Bridge.

Measuring a whopping 32.5 kilometres (20.2 miles), the Donghai Bridge was completed in 2005, and connects Shanghai (above) to the Yangshan Islands in the East China Sea.

Most of the six lane bridge is low-level viaduct, but there are two cable-stayed sections which allow ships to pass, the larger of which has a span of 420 m.

Apparently the seemingly meandering path the bridge takes across the East China Sea was specifically designed to keep drivers more alert during their long crossing.

While questions have been raised over the financial logic of projects like the Donghai Bridge, China is rapidly emerging as the new Land of Long Bridges. China now has seven of the top twelve longest bridges in the world, all of which were completed in the last 5 years.

There’s information about and a great picture of the Donghai Bridge available at Wikipedia. You can also read about the current longest cross-sea bridge, which will likely also have been superseded by the time we get to it.

Thanks to Lukas Nowacki and Tom.

Giants have a hard time getting clean. I mean, baths aren’t usually built big enough to fit your average giant, right? Which is the only sensible explanation as to why there’s a giant sitting in the Guadalquivir river in Córdoba, Spain.

Here’s a few ground-level photos to quell the unbelievers.

Thanks to Jimbo.

Driving across the frozen Amur River between Russian and China we can see a couple of trucks – driven by the fearless and legendary Ice Road Truckers!

Although it seems ludicrous, building “Ice Roads” over lakes, rivers or seas, is at times preferable to carving a road on land, as you can get long continuous straights on the ice, which hilly tree-covered land just doesn’t offer. However in this case it appears to be the only existing way across the river.

Driving across frozen water in a 2 tonne truck is of course slightly dangerous. Depending on the country, the ice only needs to be about 20cm thick for authorities to allow trucks onto the surface, and speeds may be limited to a painfully slow 16mph. Luckily our particular truckers don’t have far to go, unlike the men who drive the 568 kilometre Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road each year.

Ice road truckers were made famous by the TV show of the same name, and the green light has apparently been given to make a fictional film based on the series in 2008. I’ve not seen the TV show, but I hear it’s much more exciting than boring footage of lonely truckers driving at 16mph across vast empty frozen lakes.

Read more about ice roads at Wikipedia.

Thanks to pooms.