The skeptics amongst you might initially think that this bizarre twisted lake isn’t natural real, but rather that the Google engineers have just discovered Photoshop’s Twirl feature. However I assure you that it is real, as it’s only a few minutes down the road from where I work!

This is actually a sculpture, “Landform” by Charles Jencks – an immaculately sculpted earth, grass and water monument in the grounds of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. The artist describes it as being “based on a strange attractor and the flow of earth and traffic”.

The best thing about Landform though, is that you can wander around all over it, as several people can be seen doing on the day this image was taken.

Read more about Charles Jencks and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art at Wikipedia.

Thanks to Fred B.

Last night in the UK saw the start of the eleventh series of popular BBC2 car show Top Gear – so it’s time to finally visit the Top Gear studio and track!

Based at Dunsfold Park in Surrey, the two mile track was built on an old RAF airfield by Lotus engineers.

As seen from the opening credits, the large hanger by the track is the studio, although the large Top Gear logo isn’t there any more (or perhaps this picture was taken before filming). Just next to the studio, you can see the production office of Top Gear, which is, according to the makers, just a portakabin!

A member at Google Earth Community has posted an overlay of the track, so you can get an aerial overview of Gambon and the follow-through, with the Hammerhead sitting at the end of the runway. The lack of visible tyre marks suggests that the images was captured before the ‘Power Lap’ and ‘Star in a Reasonably Priced Car’ features began.

You can find out more about Top Gear and Dunsfold Park at Wikipedia. Sightseeing car fans in the UK can watch the most recent Top Gear again at BBC’s iPlayer.

Thanks to Scott Blair, Shane Ferguson, Justin Flavin, Stu Gowdy, Lee, Patrick, Scott and Matt Wix.

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

Whilst not technically a desert, The Great Dune of Pyla (or Pilat), France, is without doubt the largest sand dune in Europe. The dune is around 500m by 3km and up to 117 metres tall, totaling about 60,000,000 m³.

Worryingly, the massive sand dune isn’t content to stay put, and seems hell-bent on swallowing up the forest and anything else that gets in its way. In tandem with coastal erosion, the dune is advancing inland at a rate of around 5 metres a year – which, multiplied by the dune’s length means that up to 15,000m² of forest is being lost every year.

Roads and several houses have already been obliterated by the dune’s progress, and if its progression continues at the same pace, in 40 year’s time the Biscarrosse road and campsite will too have been lost forever.

See the Great Dune of Pyla’s official website for more info (where they also have a good gallery of photos clearly showing the forest being consumed by sand), or read the painfully factual Wikipedia page.

This sparse forest in Denmark bares a uncanny resemblance to a face, could it be just a coincidence?

Unfortunately not, as it’s man-made. But the face is the work of famous 1800s Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, who originally created the design by cutting some holes in a bit of paper.

Titled “The Sun as a Face”, I doubt he ever expected to have the crude artwork recreated in the medium of forest. Neither would he have expected a “nature playground”, as seen in this smaller representation to the north.

The forest was planted in 2005 as part of Odense’s celebration of the bicentenary of Hans Christian Andersen’s birth.

However, the city officials went completely overboard, and plastered this design all over the city!

Further information is available in PDF leaflets for the wood and the celebrations.

Thanks to DJoe.

Hidden away in the forests of western Russia, is a highly suspicious-looking collection of buildings which have never been place-marked by the Google Earth Community, and don’t seem to have ever been mentioned on the web.

The buildings are all exactly the same size (around 30m long), are identically spaced, and point in an identical direction. They’re likely to be impossible to see from the ground due to the dense forest, but the perimeter is marked by a road all the way round. Some of the buildings are missing however – several appear to have recently collapsed, and others have become completely overgrown.

There’s a small branch railway that services this place from a depot in the nearest village, Semrino, and the nearest village with a Russian Wikipedia page is Susanin, just to the south. None of this information turned up any answers unfortunately.

Alexei, our multi-lingual author of Google Sightseeing Italiano who also speaks Russian, investigated further and turned up this contact page which describes the area as an active army “reserve” – which he says means a strategic reserve stock of food, arms or anything else that might be required in case of emergency…

Despite the general state of repair of the place, Alexei informs us that it’s still very much active and is under 24 hour armed surveillance!

Thanks to ilya and Alexei.