In 1998, the tiny truck-stop village of Ilakaka in Madagascar was transformed into a bustling mining town, and one of the most dangerous places in the country. The reason for this dramatic change was the discovery of massive sapphire deposits in the valley.

Browsing the area from above you can see thousands of small mine holes randomly peppered across the landscape. With no official control on the mining the holes are often dug by just one or two people hoping to make a quick fortune from the sapphires in the sand deep below.

As word of the town’s riches spread, larger organisations moved in and you can spot the larger pits by the stepped sand walls. It is now estimated that 50% of the world’s sapphires come from this one town.

Thanks to The Big Picture which have their usual fantastic collection of photos.

Beaufort West is a town in South Africa, which must be the only town in the world to claim that it has a prison in the middle of a roundabout.

The town lies at the intersection of the N1 and N12 highways (two of South Africa’s busiest roads), and it’s the N1 that splits around the buildings. The prison was established in 1873, so presumably the road was divided to avoid the building, rather than this being some sort of primitive escape-deterrent!

Of all the people who drive around this roundabout every day, I wonder how many of them even realise they’re circling a prison?

Thanks to Fraser (again), via magnumphotos.com (which has some more information on the troubled town as well as an excellent, if not entirely SFW photo gallery).

The latest imagery update has now arrived on Google Maps, and with it comes this rather sad image of a beached Sperm Whale on the island of Hjelmsøya, which is off the coast of the extreme north of Norway.

According to gyrrus, who found the image of the whale:

it probably drifted onshore already dead … and was removed by the Norwegian Coast Guard a week or two after this image was taken.

This isn’t the only example of a dead whale found in Google’s imagery – all the way back in February 2006 we posted this image of a bleeding whale on a beach in South Africa.

We also previously featured a couple of pods of very-much-alive whales, as well as a roundup of some of the best fake whales across the globe.

Thanks to gyrrus.

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.