Following on from yesterday’s Rio-Antirio Bridge, right at the very end of the Gulf of Corinth is the Corinth Canal, a 6.3 kilometre long canal which technically turned the Peloponnesian peninsula into an island upon its completion in 1893. Although the canal is only 21 metres wide it’s considered a great technical achievement for its time, and saves small ships the 400 km long journey around the Peloponnesus.

At each end of the canal there are unique submersible bridges which can be lowered to the bottom of the canal to allow the boats to get past! Very cool. You can see a sequence of photos showing the bridge in action on the Wikipedia page.

Inspired by some posters I’ve seen recently advertising a rival mapping service, here’s the Rio-Antirio bridge which spans the Gulf of Corinth in Greece, which has the world’s longest cable-stayed suspended deck. It was completed in 2004 but is still under construction in these images. (Update: Turns out the bridge in the poster is actually the Vasco da Gama bridge in Lisbon, whoops! Thanks Geoff.)

Due to the movement of tectonic plates, the distance between land here is increasing at a rate of 30 mm per year. To accomodate this, the piers of the bridge are designed to slide, accomodating any expansion of the Gulf within the bridge’s lifetime.

There’s more at the WIkipedia page and at the official site, neither of which seem to be able to decide how to spell Rio[n]-Antir[r]io[n].

Thanks to Abigail Brady, Will, Bertrand Capo, dustin, Igor and Pille.

The simian messiah has been found! Twice! All hail our mighty primate overlords.

Thanks to Sebastian ‘BuzzDee’ and Cecco.

This is the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. The Acroplois has an incredibly ancient history (described in some detail over at Wikipedia), but today it is best known for the most famous surviving building of Ancient Greece, the Parthenon (which is shown in our thumbnail). The Parthenon has stood here for nearly 2,500 years (Wikipedia page), and there’s lots of other ancient sights at here too, so here’s a map of the area in the the time of Socrates and Plato to compare with.

Here in Edinburgh we’ve got the National Monument, a copy of the Parthenon which was unfortunately never finished (supposedly due to a lack of funds), and is known locally as Edinburgh’s Disgrace (Wikipedia page). There’s no high-res of it yet, but I bet you’ll all be glad to hear that I can see it from my bedroom window

There’s another (way more impressive) copy in Centennial Park, Nashville, but again no high-res I’m afraid

Back to ancient Greece, and just east of the Acropolis you can still see the remaining columns of the Temple Of Olympian Zeus (Wikipedia page).

Thanks to… deep breath… Jean Lorraine, Chris Jernigan, Adam Parker, Bltiz, Matt, ray hollis, Martin Willey, Jim L., Ron Vogel, Roland, Stephen Train, Ruben Vermeersch, Salinga, Sig, Matt, GS, Evan O., Bennet Langlotz, Gut, Ellen van Swieten, Greg Askins, Ian, Ken Arnold, Feng Wu, banic, Boniface, martin e, Serge Lyubomudrov, noknok, Richard Cobbe, Scott Kleihege, Fai Sheng and cacafuego.

Update: Turns out that this is actually just an image glitch, thanks to everyone who helped clear that up. Still cool though

Check out this fantastic image of half-sunk ships in Greece. Spooky!

Props to Mike for this little beauty

Here is the sports complex used for the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens. Most of the venues were still under construction at the time of the photo, but you can still see the various sections.

Starting from the west is the Olympic Velodrome (with photo-stitching error) which was used for the track cycling. To the east are the open air swimming pools (of which only one is filled). Then we get the Olympic Indoor Hall before the Olympic Stadium, with the two parts of the roof lying to either side. North east are the sixteen tennis courts.

For comparison a more recent satellite photo is available on Wikipedia.

Thanks: Bill Kendrick, Jean Lorraine, Chris Jernigan, Anne Mathews, Marc Armstrong, Tim, Freddie, Terry Foster, Jim L., Daniel Jibouleau, Michael Davis