All sights in Africa

Google Sightseeing takes you on tour of the world as seen from satellite, using the free Google Earth program, or Google Maps in your web browser. Each weekday your guides James and Alex present new weird and wonderful sights as suggested by readers.

The editors: James & Alex

More Scotch Tape

Posted by Alex Turnbull, Monday, 25th July 2005

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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.

Ghana Scotch Tape

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?

Libyan Tape

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…

Russian Tape

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

The Richat Structure

Posted by Alex Turnbull, Tuesday, 19th July 2005

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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.

Richat Structure Jebel Uwaynat

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

‘Net Jesus Red’

Posted by Alex Turnbull, Tuesday, 19th July 2005

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Some large type. ‘Net Jesus Red‘ is seen here written on the side of a hill in Pretoria, the administrative capital of South Africa. I assume the language is Afrikaans, but unfortunately none of the online tools I could find would translate it…

I tried Dutch though, and got ‘Save Exactly Jesus’. Can anyone do a more accurate translation?

Updated: Thanks to everyone who translated the Afrikaans to “Only Jesus Saves”.

Net Jesus Red

Thanks to TeddyJoe.

Shipwreck!

Posted by Alex Turnbull, Friday, 15th July 2005

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This is the hulking, rusted remains of some sort of large ship off the coast of South Africa… a few hundred miles up the coast from here is the famous skeleton coast, home to countless shipwrecks.

Shipwreck

Many thanks to Patrick. Yes that Patrick :-)

Desert Farming

Posted by Alex Turnbull, Monday, 27th June 2005

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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?

Dog Farm

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