We’re continuing the first annual GSS Desert Week! In time-honoured tradition, we’ll mostly be posting about deserts. For about a week!

The Sahara is probably the world’s most famous desert, and covers much of northern Africa. However today we’re only looking at one tiny part of the desert, in the country of Niger.

It’s not obvious at first, but if you look closely at the top of this sand dune you’ll see what we think is a dust devil (which is like a tornado made of sand).

Sandstorms are common in the Sahara and the walls of sand can reach up to 6,000 metres high. In fact, so much sand is blown up into the air that the Earth has an atmospheric layer made up entirely of Sahara sand!

This image comes to Google Earth as part of the National Geographic Megaflyover project. See all our previous posts for more of the fantastic high-resolution images.

Read more on Dust Devils and the Sahara on Wikipedia.

Thanks to Yvan.

Welcome to the first annual GSS Desert Week! In time-honoured tradition, we’ll mostly be posting about deserts. For about a week!

The Namib Desert in Namibia and Angola forms part of the Namib-Naukluft National Park, and covers an area of 50,000 km². This part of the world has experienced arid conditions for at least 55 million years, which makes the Namib Desert the oldest desert in the world.

The Namib covers much of the Atlantic Ocean coast of Namibia, where the collision of the water-laden sea air and the bone-dry desert air causes immense fogs and strong currents, making this place as notorious for ending the lives of sailors as the more famous Skeleton Coast to the north. There are plenty of shipwrecks to be found in this imagery for those that care to find them!

Away from the coast, this massive desert receives less than 10 mm of rain annually and is almost completely barren, apart from the spectacularly complex dune patterns.

In the eastern part of the desert we find the famous Sossusvlei salt pan, which can sometimes be seen filled with water when a flash-flood fills the Tsauchab river. Note the tourist buses parked in the shade of a tree.

To the south is the Dead Vlei salt pan where even from up here we can spot the “skeletons” of trees which are believed to be about 900 years old - scorched black by the sun and unable to decompose due to lack of moisture.

Perhaps most impressive of all the sights here though, are the mammoth dunes which surround the salt pans. Some of them rise up to 340 metres, which makes them the highest sand dunes in the world.

Check out the photos on Flickr of giant dunes, tree skeletons, and the dunes as seen from in the Dead Vlei.

See Wikipedia for more info on the Namib Desert, the Namib-Naukluft National Park, the Tsauchab, Sossusvlei and the Dead Vlei.

A star fort or trace italienne is a type of military fortification first introduced in Italy around the mid-fifteenth century. Traditional medieval castles, towers and ring forts had proved extremely vulnerable to increasingly mobile cannons, and star forts were introduced specifically to better defend against them.

The tiny Italian town of Palmanova was founded in 1593, and using all the military innovations of the 16th century was built in the shape of nine-pointed star. You can still see quite clearly how the shape of the ramparts allows the points of the star to defend each other. Originally a moat surrounded the town (which partially remains today), and three heavily guarded gates (1, 2, 3) were the only way in.

Palmanova, Italy (Wikipedia)

Cannons were most effective when they were fired perpendicular to the walls of the building under attack, and the star shaped design meant that to best position their weapons, attacking forces would have enter the space between the points of the star - where they would be fired on from both sides!

The judicious use of moats could further thwart the attacking forces, as demonstrated superbly here at Naarden, Netherlands.

Naarden, Netherlands (Wikipedia)

By the late seventeenth-century star forts reached the pinnacle of their development, as shown by this complicated example in Bourtange, Netherlands, which has been fully restored to how it would have been in 1742. Here we can see that the design provides defence in depth, with tiers of ramparts that an attacker would have had to overcome to be in with a chance of taking the fort.

Bourtange, Netherlands (Wikipedia)

This ingenious design quickly became the gold standard for defensive forts, and went on to spread across Europe and the Americas:

Fort Manoel, Malta (Wikipedia)

Fort McHenry, Maryland (Wikipedia)

Fort Jay (Wikipedia) and Fort Ticonderoga (Wikipedia), New York

Castillo de San Marcos, Florida (Wikipedia)

The design even reached South Africa, where today the Castle of Good Hope can be seen right in the middle of the city! It used to be on the coast, but land reclamation allowed the city to expand around it.

Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town, South Africa (Wikipedia)

In the nineteenth century the development of the exploding shell changed the nature of defensive fortifications forever, and the star fort soon became utterly obsolete. Which is why several are today used for completely different purposes - like this example in Slovakia where they now spend their time trying to keep people inside rather than out.

Leopoldov Prison, Slovakia (Wikipedia)

And finally, what is probably the world’s most famous star fort isn’t actually known for being a star fort at all - as Fort Wood is today the distinctive star-shaped pedestal underneath New York’s Statue of Liberty.

Fort Wood, New York (Wikipedia)

We’ve previously featured just one star fort several star forts, including Kastellet in Copenhagen, Citadel Hill in Canada, and the aforementioned Fort McHenry in Maryland. If that’s not enough, there’s a whole page about them at Wikipedia too.

Thanks to Dan W, Manuel Hewitt, RB, tom schuring, Stefano Bertolo and Federico Cretti.

I wonder what kind of animal left these tracks on these salt flats in South Africa? Are there any animal trackers out there who can identify the creatures responsible?

Part of the National Geographic African Megaflyover Project, this particular image also features some slightly more identifiable tracks, but not left by an animal I suspect…

See our top-rated post of all time - Google Sightseeing Safari - for lots of animals that were still there when the photographs were taken!

Thanks to lepadekor.

Here in the city of Djenné, Mali stands the Great Mosque of Djenné, which is the largest mud brick building in the world.

The first mosque was built on this site in the 13th century, but was later demolished, so the current structure dates from 1907. It was built using bricks of sun-baked mud, with mud for mortar, and is coated in a plaster mix which is basically just mud.

Using nothing but mud-derivatives doesn’t make for a very sound structure, so the building requires frequent repairs. To aid this process bundles of palm branches have been added into the walls to support the structure and act as a sort of scaffolding climbing wall for the repair work.

More info about the Great Mosque at Wikipedia and pictures on Flickr.

Thanks to Sven van Heel.

This small rocky outcrop off the coast of South Africa is Seal Island, which is named for the thousands of Cape Fur Seals that occupy it, and famous for the unique marine drama that unfolds here.

At various times of the year the island’s waters are home to a number of Great White Sharks that very much enjoy dining on the island’s seal population. In fact, the sharks regularly launch themselves vertically out of the water to attack the seals - a behaviour that may be unique to this one place. This is such a common occurrence that you can simply pay $210 US dollars to go and watch the sharks have the seals for breakfast. In mid-air.

This breathtaking behaviour featured in the BBC’s stunning Planet Earth tv series, as well as the Discovery Channel’s Air Jaws programmes. If you haven’t seen one of these shows, make sure you watch this truly incredible clip of the sharks in action on YouTube.

Thanks to Michael.

Scientists working with Kew gardens have today announced their discovery of a massive “self-destructing palm tree” in Madagascar. The tree has a bizarre unusual reproductive cycle, whereby after around 50 years of growth, the process of flowering actually kills the tree!

the colourful display and the production of fruit is so taxing that the nutrient reserves of the palm run dry as soon as it fruits and the entire tree collapses and dies.

The story has been reproduced in numerous articles today, all of which mentioned this little morsel from the original press release:

The plant is so massive, it can even be seen on Google Earth.

And yet not ONE of the many, many, many, many, many reporters managed to include a link to the location of the tree, or even the co-ordinates! And the reason of course, is that none of them actually bothered to check whether you really can see this tree or not.

Fortunately the team at Google Sightseeing don’t subscribe to such lazy reporting methods, and we can EXCLUSIVELY REVEAL the location of the Mysterious Self-Destructing Palm Tree!

Um, hang on, that’s just a forest. Apparently it’s the one in the middle, let’s zoom in a bit…

Right… If only it looked a little more interesting, eh?

Thanks to Bronwyn at Kew gardens and readers Michael Chung and Marc Wintle.

There have been many creatures found on Google Earth, but the most impressive ones are mostly there as part of the National Geographic African Megaflyover Project, which brought us thousands of super-high-resolution aerial photographs of Africa. So to highlight the best, today we’re going on Google Sightseeing Safari!

Let’s start with the basics: many of the animals we can see in Africa are of course working animals, like this large flock of sheep, these forlorn looking donkeys, and an absolute plethora of cows, goats, camels, and people filling up at a well.

We can do much better than this though - out in the wild, things start to get a lot more exciting.

Firstly we can see a small group of Gazelles caught mid-leap in the desert of Chad, and there’s obviously been a few passing this way - look how many hoof-prints they’ve left in the sand! Also caught leaping (but through a river), are a large group of Red Lechewe in Zambia.

Again in Chad, but out on the savannah this time, we find this wonderful image of a small family of Elephants huddling together to protect their young. Presumably from the terrifying machine flying overhead…

Out on the plain in Mozambique we can see a portion of what must have been a fairly enormous herd of Buffalo, again presumably fleeing from the plane above them.

Thanks to the exceptional resolution of these images, the animals don’t have to be as big as the 1.7 metre high African Buffalo to be spotted. In a swamp in Mali, there’s a great image of a Giant Stork flapping lazily around. Just to the south there’s actually one perched in a mangrove, and lots of other birds have been caught on the wing elsewhere in Mali.

Not all the birds found are own their own though - on the coast of Mozambique there’s a stunning image of a huge flock of Pink Flamingos taking off (perhaps they were startled by this small boat to the north?).

To Zambia now, where we can see some lovely chubby little baby hippos and even better, in Tanzania we can see a pod of hundreds of hippos wallowing in the mud, which is a truly incredible sight.

Here’s another shot of the same hippos in the mud¹, but this time we can more clearly see that’s there’s actually a dead hippo lying on the bank, being feasted on by vultures.

Hippos tend to share their pools and rivers with other creatures - particularly crocodiles, and nearby to yet another pod of hippos we can see the unmistakable silhouette of a crocodile just under the water. Next to the first hippos we found, there’s another crocodile, just chilling out on the bank.

Finally, although not being the kind of animals you’d traditionally expect to see while on safari, these images of seals on the coast of Namibia are too good not to include!

And here ends the great Google Sightseeing Safari. Of course this is only the beginning as there are more than 500 Megaflyover images to explore in Google Earth! Reggie98 at the Keyhole foums has been categorizing all of the animals to be found in them.

To see all the Megaflyover images, open “Gallery” in the Layers sub-panel (bottom-left) and enable the National Geographic Layer. You’ll see little red aircraft symbols appearing all over Africa, and each of these will take you to a hi-res shot of the area. Also, here’s a link to download a kml file which details many of the hundreds of undocumented images that form part of this enormous and stunning collection.

Thanks to all of the people at the Keyhole forums who helped me find these fascinating images! For more background on the project, visit the official Megaflyover and National Geographic pages.