There are about 80 known whale species around the globe, the largest of which is of course the Blue Whale, which can measure up to a massive 30m long.

Such a giant beast should easily be visible on the aerial and satellite photographs of Google Earth, it’s just a matter of finding them…

To start with, there’s definitely a blue whale in this Japanese swimming pool, but I don’t think that counts.

The Route 66 landmark Blue Whale slide is so famous it even appeared in Sega’s King of Route 66 video game. More info.

Outside of UC Santa Cruz’s Long Marine Laboratory there’s an 85-foot long Blue Whale skeleton. The female whale was washed ashore of Pescadero Beach in 1979, after dying of unknown causes.

We’ve still not found any live whales though! Off the coast of Santa Barbara there’s a 10m long grey blob that could resemble a whale, or more likely a shark. Either way it would have to be very close to the surface to be seen so easily. I’m not convinced.

‘Reverence‘ is a sculpture by Jim Sardonis, which depicts two whales seemingly diving into the grass. The tails are each 12-13 foot tall and made of granite. More info.

Back in Japan, and Ueno Park has more than tails – there’s a life size Blue Whale diving into the ground. More info.

And finally, to Argentina, where there could just be real whales.

According to whale expert wildslide these are southern right whales who breed in this area during the months of May and October. Success!

Previously on Google Sightseeing: Whales! and Beached Whale

Thanks: The many people who thought they saw a whale, including: Jonathan_Tronson, FrequentFlyer, danescombe, bagabnoosh, kjfitz, Ralph Mettier, Nick, Jim Morton, Andrew, Rking, Yoshino, Barb, Caraurta, danescombe, Todd Pearson, Andrea from Italy, Nichole, James, A30 & John Hartnup

The BBC’s Top Gear program recently took the Bugatti Veyron for a quick test drive — a very quick test drive¹. James May was asked to test the car’s top speed, and there was apparently only one place in the world it could be done — Volkswagen’s super-secret test facility in Germany, Ehra-Lessien.

Why? Because Ehra-Lessien has an unbroken straight 9 kilometres in length, which you can see running along the top of our thumbnails. It’s so long, that if you stood on one side of the straight, you wouldn’t be able to see the other end due to the curvature of the Earth. Seriously, this straight is enormous. One or two thumbnails just couldn’t do it justice, so we’ll do it in two parts. Here’s the northern end…

…and then we have to skip a couple of thumbnails before we get to the southern end!

There’s several cars visible on the straight, including one that seems to be going really very fast.

There’s also a small blob — which is either some kind of bug on the image, or a very strange new kind of concept-tractor.

Anyway, while May couldn’t get the Veyron up to its theoretical top speed, he did manage to equal the fastest speed of any production road car, reaching an almost incomprehensible 253 miles, or 407 kilometres per hour² on this very straight. You can watch the clip on Google Video to really get a feel for how fast that is.

Thanks to Top Gear.

Initially we thought this was possibly the coolest find ever, but sadly this is not 9 small planes flying in formation over Denmark. No, even better than that, when you look closer it becomes obvious that someone has taken a single plane, and has been cloning it in Photoshop!

This is of course a complete scandal… I mean, it’s all very well blurring out Government buildings, which is just hiding the truth… but this? This is out and out fantasy! Where will it all end? (Probably Alien Civilizations and UFOs no doubt…)

The company that provides this particular aerial image is called Scankort, but as yet we’ve been unable to prove whether the image was manipulated by them, or by Google themselves. However, there is one other possibility… No, I’m not talking about aliens, I’m talking about BBC 2!

They get everywhere those little 2s…

Via gearthhacks and virtualglobetrotting.

The urban equivalent of Cow Tipping, the inner-city phenomenon of Car Tipping has begun to spread like wildfire across Germany now that its been spotted on Google Earth…

Also see our post on Extreme Parking for more.

Via Gearth Blog.

There’s something very strange going in Moscow, Russia.

It looks as if a bus has come to a stop right across a motorway, bringing traffic to a complete halt in both directions. There doesn’t appear to be any debris from a crash visible, so what on earth happened here?

Has the bus crashed, or could we actually be witnessing some sort of hostage situation?

Thanks to Jonas Rasmussen.