The Street View car has come fairly close to several fires over the years, and many remain to be seen – such as this sidewalk garbage fire in a Marseilles underpass which has filled the air with acrid black smoke, or this small roadside brush fire midway between Cardiff and Newport, Wales.

In Sao Paulo, this petrol station is nearly obscured completely by the smoke from a car fire.

The most inflammatory encounters for the Street View car, however, may be these large roadside fires in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa and Chiapas, Mexico.

I wonder if they’ve tried putting these fires out with the world’s largest fire hydrant? Then again, it probably wouldn’t help, seeing as how as it’s located over in Columbia, South Carolina. Besides, the Street View Car in general has bad luck with hydrants.

Fortunately, there are usually emergency workers on the case. Here in Wiesbaden, Germany, an upper-level house fire is being attended to by a number of fire trucks.

At Philadelphia International Airport, this burned-out husk of an airplane sits in a paved circle. The helpless victim of firefighter training, it joins its comrade at Florida’s MacDill Air Force Base.¹

This small brush fire on the North Island of New Zealand was likely set deliberately as part of the annual process of getting the land ready for the season’s planting, and this field fire in Bulgaria is also deliberate. This other brush fire in Botswana captured by the National Geographic African Megaflyover Project, however, appears to be far more dangerous.

Then there are full-on forest fires. In the wilderness of the Northwest Territories, this forest fire is caught in the heat of the moment, sending a giant plume of smoke into the air that can be seen over 20 miles (30 km) away.

Just as ominous is this massive fire in the far east of Russia, seen here blazing a path toward the Pacific Ocean.

What’s worse than an out-of-control wildfire? Try three, as captured here in Cameroon.

Finally, here’s the Street View car getting incredibly meta, as it takes a picture of someone taking a picture of a fire along the South African coast.

Locations: Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Florida, France, Germany, Mexico, New Zealand, Northwest Territories, Pennsylvania, Russia, South Africa, South Carolina, Wales / Categories: Aircraft, Natural Landmarks, Other Vehicles, Street Views

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Approximately the size of Austria, Novaya Zemlya consists of two main islands, Severny (northern) and Yuzhny (southern), along with numerous smaller islands. The archipelago is actually a northern extension of the Ural Mountains, from which it derives its long, skinny shape.

The entire archipelago can get sealed in by ice for much of the year. Google Earth imagery captured this massive wall of ice choking off the west end of this fjord. On the east side of Novaya Zemlya, imagery taken at a different time shows pack ice breaking up and slowly heading out into the Kara Sea.

Novaya Zemlya was covered for millennia by a glacial ice sheet. As the ice sheet advanced over the islands, it scoured the bedrock below, leaving giant parallel striations and scrapes across the landscape eventually filled by rivers and creeks. When these creeks freeze, it gives the impression from above of snow-covered tree branches or tinsel hanging from a Christmas tree.

On Yuzhny Island, we see a drumlin field – parallel mounds of glacial till left behind by the advancing ice.

Severny Island is nearly completely covered in glacial ice to this day. Here, we see a cluster of glaciers come together as they flow toward the Barents Sea. The black stripes are moraines; lines of soil and debris scraped off the mountainside. Once the glacial ice reaches the sea, icebergs calve from the glacier’s tongue into the water.

At the northern tip of Severny Island lies Cape Zhelaniya, the northeasternmost point of Europe at 76°57′N, 68°34′E. The Soviet Union constructed a small base here that was actually shelled by the German Navy during World War II. During the Cold War, the cape became a secret station for experimental nuclear tests, and later a weather station. The station’s buildings at the west end of the cape are still intact.

Amazingly, there are over 2,700 people living in Novaya Zemlya, of which 2,600 live in the only major settlement, Belushya Guba. Largely home to military personnel and their families, the town is being looked to as a future oil and mining hub as Arctic shipping lanes develop. Just to the northeast of Belushya Guba is the major airport of the archipelago at Rogachevo, which receives two scheduled flights from the mainland each week. Rogachevo was founded in the 1950s as a staging base for long-range bombing missions.

While there isn’t a large amount of high-resolution imagery for the islands, there are some goodies to be found, such as the remains of Cold War-era buildings at Bashmachnyy, where old base buildings can be seen falling apart as they are slowly reclaimed by the wind, ice and snow.

Most infamously, Novaya Zemlya was home to the most powerful nuclear explosion ever recorded: the 1961 detonation of the Tsar Bomba. The 27-ton bomb produced a 50-megaton blast that obliterated everything within a 55km (34 mile) range and broke windows 90km (56 miles) away. 50 years on, the massive black scar left by the bomb can still be seen. At the centre of the scar lies this crater-shaped lake.

Today, Novaya Zemlya is becoming popular with cruise ships looking to catch glimpses of the isolated polar bear population that inhabit the islands, as well as their mountains and glaciers. For now, however, Novaya Zemlya remains mostly a military outpost at the edge of Europe.

Locations: Russia /

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Take Monaco, for instance, where the cameras approach the eastern border only to be greeted with this giant abstract sculpture at the crossing (or is that just Monaco giving a massive middle-finger to Google’s camera?).

The western entrance to Monaco is quite stunning, with the road descending into the principality as cliffs loom overhead.

Moving south into the Pyrenees, we reach the border of Andorra, where we can sneak a peek into the ski resort of Pas de la Casa, including some oddly-coloured apartments on the hillside.

For sheer impressiveness, however, it’s hard to beat the sight of the Rock of Gibraltar looming over the Spanish border at La Linea while a thunderstorm prepares to hit overhead:

The prize for ‘Most Ornate Entrance Captured on Street View’ might have to go to the border between Rimini, Italy and Serravalle, San Marino, where the microstate has constructed a pedestrian overpass and an observation tower for tourists, leading into a major shopping district. The other main entrance to San Marino would probably be described as ‘quaint’ by comparison.

The absurdly complicated Dutch-Belgian border at Baarle (documented previously on Google Sightseeing) is likely to have presented special challenges to the Street View team. However, they have cleverly managed to avoid publishing any images captured on Belgian soil – despite examples such as this, where the camera car must drive from Holland at one end of the block, across a tiny sliver of Belgium, and back to Holland at the other end.

Baarle’s not the only town cut in half in Street View. Here’s a place where you park in France to dine at a cafe in Luxembourg:

Near the tri-point of Italy, Austria and Slovenia, we get this multi-national flag arrangement at an old Austrian customs building. Further into the Alps, the Street View car camera ends its trip at the ski resort of Nassfeld, where one of the ski lifts lies right next to a field of grazing cattle.

The lone glimpse of Russian soil captured so far on Street View is the view across a small lake from Norway (the only place you can actually drive south into Russia from), where we get a blurry view of a building on a hill overlooking the lake. Hmm, a regular house, or a Cold War spy shanty? You be the judge…

South Africa is the only African country so far visited by Street View, but sadly most of the border shots are not particularly notable. For example, the images simply stop by a fence on the middle of the road at the border with Swaziland, while the border with Botswana couldn’t be any more different, merely possessing a single stop sign.

We end our forbidden borderland odyssey with a glimpse from Singapore across the Straits of Johor to downtown Johor Bahru.

With luck, one day we’ll be able to get a glimpse beyond those borders as Street View continues to roll out coverage in countries across the globe. (Then we can finally find out just what it is they’re trying to hide from us…)

Locations: Austria, Belgium, Botswana, Crown Dependencies, France, Italy, Malaysia, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain / Categories: Natural Landmarks, Street Views, Structures

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Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve was member of a family of prominent astronomers¹. While the majority of his work involved the study of astronomical bodies, he also turned his attentions to geodetic surveying – the measurement and representation of the Earth.

He studied at the University of Tartu in Estonia and established the first of his triangulation points at the observatory in that town. There is a large stone monument just to the north of the main building.

Further locations were established roughly along a meridian line originating in Tartu and spanning almost 3,000km. The majority of the sites were hill- or mountain-tops, or other prominent points of land. This wide range of triangulation points would have allowed accurate calculations of the size of the whole planet.

The 265 locations were – at that time – in only two countries: the Sweden-Norway Union and the Russian Empire. The intervening years have seen these two disintegrate into ten separate countries. Most of the 34 locations which make up the World Heritage Site are marked by monuments of some kind. The northernmost point is in Hammerfest, Norway. It’s a low-res area on Google maps, but the monument is worth a closer look.

In Tornio, northern Finland, the quite beautiful Alatornion kirkko was the only building – other than the Tartu observatory – that was used as a triangulation point.

Further south in Finland, Aavasaksa is a small hill also used as a triangulation point. At the top there is a hunting lodge used by leaders of the Russian Empire. It is currently in use as a cafe and there is a monument consisting of a large boulder surrounded by an iron representation of the globe.

In the Baltic Sea, points were located on two islands: the highest point on Finland’s Mustaviiri, and a hill-top on Russia’s Gogland.

The village of Jekabpils in Latvia has a park named after Struve at the location of the triangulation point.

The majority of points to the south of the Arc – in Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine – are marked by small monuments, in rural areas covered by low-res imagery, so there’s not much to see on satellite images. If you’re curious, you can find many of the locations marked on this Google Maps interface.

The southernmost monument is in what appears to be a housing development in the Ukrainian town of Stara Nekrasivka,

Wikipedia has a bit more information, while the Wikidot entry has a detailed list and map of all 265 triangulation points, along with photos of many of the World Heritage locations.

Locations: Belarus, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Ukraine / Categories: Buildings, Monuments, Street Views, Structures, World Heritage Sites

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The Russian Woodpecker was an over-the-horizon (OTH) radar system used during the later years of the Cold War. Broadcast towers used for its shortwave signals are still in place near Chernobyl.

The Woodpecker nickname derived from the loud and repetitive signals being broadcast. They were so powerful that they interfered with radio signals and telecommunications around the world, from their beginning in 1976 to when they ceased at the end of 1989 when the Soviet Union started to collapse.

There were various conspiracy theories about the source of the sound, from the orthodox (radio jamming or submarine communications) to the bizarre (global mind control or aliens). However, NATO forces quickly realised that it was an OTH system, and were even able to photograph the massive arrays of 150m tall antennas, which they dubbed the Steel Yard, and nearby buildings, which look quite overgrown now.

The proximity to Chernobyl means this location is likely permanently abandoned, though local amateur radio enthusiasts have been known to rig their own systems up to the antennas!

Officially named Duga-3, the system was completed by a receiving facility approximately 60km away from the transmitter. Unfortunately this area is only covered by very low-resolution imagery.

A second Duga-3 system was installed in Siberia – again a pair of facilities 60km apart, though most of the installations have been dismantled. However, if you zoom in, there appear to be large collections of military vehicles at both locations.

This system was intended to cover any gaps in the original system’s OTH radar detection of incoming missiles from the USA.

These systems followed on from prototypes Duga-1 and Duga-2 which were built and tested in southern Ukraine. Little evidence of these systems remains, but there is an interesting circular formation nearby.

Can anyone find any other top-secret shortwave systems elsewhere in the world?

Learn more about the Russian Woodpecker at Wikipedia and Passing Strangeness.

Thanks to Mada.

Locations: Russia, Ukraine / Categories: Abandoned, Structures, Towers, Weirdness

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On August 23rd 2010, for the first time in over four years, the tone was once more interrupted – to be replaced with a Russian voice that said:

UVB-76, UVB-76 – 93 882 naimina 74 14 35 74 – 9 3 8 8 2 nikolai, anna, ivan, michail, ivan, nikolai, anna, 7, 4, 1, 4, 3, 5, 7, 4 – (repeated twice)

While it is believed that UVB-76 is a specialised Numbers Station (used to transmit encoded messages to spies) the messages themselves have never yet been decoded – although perhaps all that is about to change…

The names used in the message are used in some Russian spelling alphabets, and spell out the first word – “naimina”, which one commenter at the UVB-76 blog translated as “on names”. Another commenter suggests that “74 14 35 74″ could be interpreted as longitude and latitude coordinates: 74.14N 35.74E.

So why would UVB-76 be broadcasting a geographical location in the middle of the Barents sea? How about a Russian anti-aircraft missile launch revealed on the same day:

The Russian Air Force is together with Air Defence units preparing a shooting exercise with the S-300 anti-Aircraft missile system from the island of Kildin in the Barents Sea.

Although, that all seems a bit ridiculously obvious, doesn’t it? The Russians are well aware that there are people continually monitoring this broadcast – so why is it so easy to connect the broadcast with the activities of the Russian armed forces?

In the last 2 days, more voices transmissions have come from UVB-76, as well as grumbles, knocks, shuffles, beeps, and a completely new buzzing noise, that nearly drowned out the sound of the original buzzer altogether.

So what does it all mean? Is someone just checking the system still works, or is this the precursor to impending total annihilation?

There’s lots more information about the mysterious UVB-76 at Wikipedia.

Thanks to uvb-76.blogspot.com via @rodti.

Locations: Russia / Categories: Buildings, Weirdness

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The city of Norilsk lies 320km north of the Arctic Circle in the frigid tundra of Siberia. It is the second largest city north of the Arctic Circle (after Murmansk), and the northernmost city in the world with a population over 100,000. It also holds an unenviable spot among the ten most polluted cities on earth thanks to the massive nickel mining operation in the area.

Due to pollution, not a single tree grows within 45km of the largest of four nickel smelters, Nadezhda¹, and it’s estimated that Norilsk contributes 1% of all sulphur dioxide released into the earth’s atmosphere.

The city itself was built with Gulag labour under the direction of Joseph Stalin, and in true Stalinist fashion, the cityscape is dominated by massive apartment blocks spaced along wide boulevards.

In 1953-54, prison labourers assigned the task of building the city staged what has become known as the Norilsk uprising. The “uprising” was actually unarmed, so the term settled upon by the authorities was “mass insubordination”. While dissent was common in the Gulag system, the uprising in Norilsk was the largest such rebellion under Stalin’s iron-fisted rule.

Many thousands of prison labourers died in the extremely harsh conditions while building the city: Norilsk is covered by snow between 250 and 270 days a year with temperatures as low as -58°C having been recorded.

After reading all this, you’re probably about ready to book your next holiday to this lovely utopia. Not so fast. Norilsk is closed to foreigners without a really good reason to go, and travel to the city is restricted even among Russian nationals. The reason for this could be to cover up the massive scale of pollution, or it could have something to do with the many ICBM silos nearby. Any other theories?

There’s more information about Norilsk at Wikipedia.

Locations: Russia / Categories: Buildings, Structures

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The main feature of the power station is a dam 245 m high and over a kilometre long. Construction was completed in 1978, though spring floods caused moderate damage in three of the ten following years. However, the accident on 17 August 2009 was much more serious, with at least 73 people having died, a large oil spill into the river, and severe damage to several turbines and other parts of the facility, leading to a total shutdown.

While some operations could restart in the near future, complete repairs could take 4 years and cost over a billion dollars. Youtube has a video of the accident¹ and English Russia has a couple of sets of photos of the aftermath: 1, 2.

The power station near the dam distributed 6400 MW of power to 2 double sets of lines (clearly visible on the high resolution images) which head north through wide sections of cleared forest before dividing into east and west routes.

The Eastern route heads to the town of Sayanogorsk which is most affected by the loss of power.

Following the cables and pylons north of town they eventually run to one of the world’s largest aluminum smelters. It is unfortunately partially obscured by cloud, but you can zoom in to see trains, storage tanks and assorted industrial buildings.

This smelter consumed up to 30% of the power generated by Sayano–Shushenskaya, and will see a long-term 50% drop in production as limited power can be diverted to it from other sources.

Locations: Russia / Categories: Buildings, Structures

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The station’s callsign is “UVB-76″, but is known amongst enthusiasts as “The Buzzer”, and the sound it transmits has been on an almost continuous loop since it was first observed in 1982.

No one knows for sure what the purpose of the signal is, and in 27 years the buzzing has only been interrupted on 3 occasions.

At 21:58 GMT on Christmas Eve 1997, 15 years after it was first observed, the buzzing abruptly stopped; to be replaced by a short series of beeps, followed by a male voice speaking Russian who repeated the following message several times:

“Ya — UVB-76. 18008. BROMAL: Boris, Roman, Olga, Mikhail, Anna, Larisa. 742, 799, 14″.

On September 12th 2002 another voice was heard, this time so distorted that only part of the message could be recognised:

“UVB-76, UVB-76. 62691 Izafet 3693 8270″.

Finally, on February 21st 2006, a third message² was transmitted which said:

“75-59-75-59. 39-52-53-58. 5-5-2-5. Konstantin-1-9-0-9-0-8-9-8-Tatiana-Oksana-Anna-Elena-Pavel-Schuka. Konstantin 8-4. 9-7-5-5-9-Tatiana. Anna Larisa Uliyana-9-4-1-4-3-4-8.”

The names used in the message are used in some Russian spelling alphabets, and although some people speculate that UVB-76 is a specialised Numbers Station, used to transmit encoded messages to spies, the messages have never been decoded, and the actual purpose of this station remains unknown.

There’s more information about the mysterious UVB-76 at WIkipedia. Thanks to Best of Wikipedia.

Locations: Russia / Categories: Buildings, Weirdness

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In mathematics, a hyperboloid is a quadric (“a D-dimensional hypersurface defined as the locus of zeros of a quadratic polynomial”) defined by, er… this complex-looking equation. Basically it’s a type of three dimensional surface that is most commonly seen as the shape of power station cooling towers.

The first ever hyperboloid structure was a water tower that was built for the All-Russia exhibition of 1896. The design consists of straight beams in a lattice arrangement, meaning tall towers could be built with minimal wind resistance.

Today seven of Shukhov’s towers remain standing in Russia, including the 160-metre-high Shukhov radio tower in Moscow which was built between 1919 and 1922 during the Russian Civil War. Currently under threat of demolition, the tower is at the top of UNESCO’s ‘Endangered Buildings’ list, and fans have begun a campaign to save it.

The 128 metre Shukhov Tower on the Oka River is the only original surviving hyperboloid electricity pylon, which was a part of a 110kV powerline built between 1927 and 1929. Because of the lattice-style design it’s barely visible in our thumbnail image, but if you click through to the map you’ll be able to see the shadow of the latticework.

The use of hyperboloid structures wasn’t limited to Russia however – in Spain the 158 metre Pylons of Cádiz, completed in 1960, remain as a fantastic example of this method of construction. Here the method was chosen because at the time the Spanish had no way of transporting large steel beams, and Francisco Franco‘s regime prohibited the import of anything that was up to the job.

Here’s a KML file of all of the 7 remaining Shukhov towers (or on a map) and there are many other hyperboloid structures in various guises around the world. Wikipedia also has more on Hyperboloid structures, as well as Vladimir Shukhov himself.

Locations: Russia, Spain / Categories: Monuments, Towers

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