Completed all the way back in 1935, this is the Grande Dixence Dam which holds back the Lac des Dix, a 4 km long lake in the Val d’Hérens, Switzerland. The water mainly comes from the summer melt of glaciers, and is piped here via a system of water supply tunnels over 100 km long.

What’s really interesting is that in summer the Lac des Dix can be up to 284 metres deep¹ - thanks to the fact that at 285 metres tall, the Grande Dixence is the world’s tallest dam.

Update: It turns out that this is actually the world’s 2nd tallest dam. See my comment for more info. Thanks to Gary for the correction.

Thanks to Joel.

While we were busy scouring the brand new Australia Day images, we failed to notice that Google have also unleashed an absolute wealth of new imagery for the rest of the world! Here’s what’s been updated:

• The entire country of Switzerland at 50cm and many Swiss cities at 25cm. This of course means the Swiss Alps are now high-res, including the Matterhorn - which is incredible seen in Google Earth.

• The entire country of Denmark at 50cm
• The French cities of Lyon; LeMans; Lourdes; Riems; Nancy; Limoges; Lille and Arles
• Potsdam and Magdeburg, Germany
• Barcelona, Belem, CapeTown, Galapagos (Isabella Island), Manaus, Mt Saint Helens, Recife, Rio, Venice)
• Whistler, British Columbia
• The whole states of Wyoming and Utah

It seems here’s also been loads of other Digitalglobe updates too, so what on earth are you waiting for? Get exploring already, and send us what you find!

Thanks to Google Maps Mania and the Google Earth Blog!

Just to the West of the Swiss town of Morges we find the biggest Swiss flag in the world (probably). It’s about 80 metres square and has been painted on a roof.

Out faithful reader ChrisW (who suggested this sight) very kindly offered to head down and investigate what goes on at the giant flag building. So he went cycling 25km out of his way to snap this shot of the disappointingly dull “Friderici Transports” - a logistics company.

Many Thanks: ChrisW & HeatherW

The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California is funded by the US Department of Energy but operated by Stanford University. The SLAC has a 3km long underground linear accelerator which is the longest linear accelerator in the world and claimed to be the world’s straightest object. The building above ground on top of the accelerator, the “klystron gallery”, is the longest building in the United States.

The Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois is another US based lab with a linear accelerator but this one uses a Synchrotron. A synchrotron is a circular accelerator that uses a magnetic field to turn the particles and an electric field to accelerate them. By careful tuning of these two fields particles can be accelerated to 99.999999% of the speed of light. Once particles get up to these speeds the experments can begin. The super accelerated particles are shoved through things, bent with mirrors and have other particles injected into the steam to see what happens.

These two circles that look like a sideways eight are the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois and make up the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator. Four miles in circumference, the Tevatron is housed in a tunnel about 30 feet below the big ring you see in the aerial view. The particles complete the four-mile course nearly 50 thousand times a second. Damn, that is fast.

The other big player in particle accelerators in CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the world’s largest physics laboratory. CERN is located on the border between France and Switzerland and is otherwise known as the birth place of that thing called the World Wide Web. CERN have numerous particle accelerators but the biggest is the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is currently under construction in tunnels that used to house the Large Electron-Positron Collider which ran from 1989 to 2000. This tunnel is 27km in length and 100 metres underground! It’s like something out of Half-Life! Unfortunately there isn’t very much to see from the air, the LHC is located somewhere in the area between Geneava airport and the Jura mountains to the North. I’ve been staring at the imagery for a while and I can’t make out any trace of it on the surface. Can you?

I’m sure there are many more accelerators out there to see but my head was starting to hurt from reading about particle physics. Feel free to post your particle physics related finds as comments on this post!

Thanks: Scott Lawson, dan, Matt, Jason, Rahul Karnik, David, joe, Foo Bar, Matt, Tom, Ilia Baldine, Douglas Boberg, Fred, Dave D, Brian Potter, Steve Abrahamson, Thomas Wade, Laurence Dorazio, Daryl Achilles, Tony Scislaw, Marc Armstrong, Tyler Stevenson, Joe, Luistxo Fernandez, Janx Spirit, David Drexler, David Drexler, Matt W., Matthew, Rodrigo, Joe, Jochen, Matthew Sz., Williamckley, Drew DeMott, Michael Lehet, Hubert Grzywacz, Bjørnven, Thomas, J Foote, Brad Lauster, Dalvenjah FoxFire, Robert Bogdon, cjw, Parker, Jim Duncan, Steve Bryson, Jeffrey Deane, Ryan Means, Benjamin, Jason Harris, David Drexler, Bobllingson, Lennie Stovel, punk floyd, Jason, SFuller and Sounil Yu.

At the point where Lake Geneva empties into the Rhone River, you can hardly miss the spectacular Jet d’Eau - a 140 metre jet of water, and officially the world’s largest fountain. Two groups of pumps spray an astonishing 500 litres of water per second into the air at 200 km/h - meaning that at any given time there’s about 2,000 litres of water in the air! You can see just how huge it is in this view from Cathedrale St. Pierre on Wikipedia

Yet another ‘world’s largest’! Will they ever end?

Thanks: Allan, Maite Elguero