One of many ancient roman cities in West Tripoli, Libya features an impressive amphitheatre. Much of this city, which is just north of the Libyan Museum of ancient history, is still to be excavated.

Thanks: Mahmoud Swed

This is the port of Tripoli in Libya, which appears to have a leaky tanker or two… Yuk!

Thanks to Twombly.

This is Waw an Namus, a 1200 metre extinct volcano in the Sahara desert, Libya. The volcano itself is surrounded by a huge area of deposited ash which stands out strikingly against the desert sands. Zoom in closer to see some spectacular colours.

You can really see which way the prevailing wind blows around here, huh?

A couple of hundred kilometres to the north you can see an absolutely vast basaltic lava flow field, known as Djebel Haroudj. If you take a broader look at the area, I think you can still make out the path the lava took from the volcano to it’s final destination.

I couldn’t find an entry for this in Wikipedia, but this page has some good stuff.

Thanks: Leonard Richardson, Mikhail, Adriaan Bos, Manny Mouse, Mike S, pfly and Lauri Kangas.

Remember our giant piece of Scotch Tape holding Canada together? Well our ever-helpful readers have since turned up several more pieces of this gargantuan sticky-tape…

Firstly we have this enormous length of tape, which is actually holding Ghana and Ivory Coast together. Not high-resolution on this one, but at the eastern end the tape fades out rather prettily into some lovely clouds.

Next up is this semi-transparent tape stitching a large section of the Libyan desert together. Notice how all of these anomalies run at very similar angles across the images?

Finally we have this shoddy looking job in Russia, which appears to have required two pieces of tape to get the job done! I think their mistake was trying to tape water together…

Thanks: Dave, Winterfresh, Alxdr, mcb, blumentopf and MoonFella.

The Richat Structure in central Mauritania is a stunning geological structure 50 kilometers across (Wikipedia entry). Once thought to be an impact crater, it is actually a sedimentary formation that has eroded flat over many eons. Apparently there’s a hotel smack-bang in the middle of it.

There are also several other similar structures in the Sahara, such as the Jebel Uwaynat (thumbnail #2) which was used to define the borders of Sudan, Egypt and Libya, and also the Brandberg Intrusion in Namibia.

Even though none of these features are in high-resolution, it’s well worth zooming in a bit, as they’re perhaps even more fascinating to look at closer up.

Thanks to Pat Scaramuzza, Peter Nordstrom, GeMatt and Kai Huebner.

Check out these bizarre circles of farmland smack-bang in the middle of the Libyan desert. This unlikely-seeming sight has been made possible by the construction of the Great Man Made River, possibly the largest water transport system ever built, consisting of a network of pipes buried underground, each four meters in diameter. In the 1960s, efforts to find oil in southern Libya led to the discovery of huge quantities of fresh water underground, and today the Great Man Made River carries more than five million cubic metres of that water under the desert, vastly increasing the amount of arable land.

However, I’m told that apparently these sources of water (which were deposited in the ice age) are only likely to last between 50 and 100 years, yet the project is estimated to have cost 25 billion US dollars.

There’s lots more of these circles around to support this theory, but does anyone else think what they’re actually doing is trying to draw a picture of a giant dog?

Thanks to Tom Beddard, Stuart McGlashan, Steve Rot, pixiecrinkle, Mark and Phillip.