Parícutin is a very young cinder cone volcano in Mexico, and like most cinder cones it will never erupt again - but the story of its creation is a truly fascinating one.

On February 20, 1943, a local farmer by the name of Dionisio Pulido witnessed a fissure appearing in his cornfield, which immediately began to spew forth ash and stones. Astonishingly within just one year the fissure had grown into a 336 m tall volcano!

Over the course of the next 8 years the volcano grew to a final height of 424 m and simultaneously buried 25 km² of the surrounding land, including two entire villages! The top of a nearby church is still visible above the long solidified magma.

(Wikipedia, ground-level pic)

Thanks to Maite Elguero.

Chichen Itza (Wikipedia) is one of the largest and most significant Mayan sites in Mexico. El Castillo (the Castle) is a 30m high pyramid and temple that is the focal point of the site.

At the spring and autumn equinox, the rising and setting sun hits the corner of the pyramid to form a shadow resembling a serpent. Climbing such pyramids is not for the faint-hearted, and El Castillo has been closed to tourists since 2006 when somebody fell to their death.

Between approximately AD 600 and AD 1000 Chichen Itza dominated social, political and economic aspects of life in this area of the Mayan civilization. Its population is estimated to have been between 40,000 and 50,000.

Archaeologists continue to discover new structures buried in the forest. Significant locations currently visible (map) include the great ball court used for a game vaguely similar to volleyball and the cenotes or wells of sacrifice.

Imagery of other Mayan sites such as Tikal in Guatemala is not so impressive. Let us know if you find other Mayan sites with good resolution.

Thanks to Paul Wilson.

The Laredo International Bridge 1 is one of four road bridges that cross the Rio Grande to connect the cities of Laredo, USA and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

The 320 m long bridge is officially known as the Gateway to the Americas International Bridge (Wikipedia) and, as we can see from this satellite shot, the sheer volume of cars waiting to get into the states really help it to live up to its name - nearly a million cars cross this bridge each year, albeit slowly.

There’s a webcam on the American side that shows a typical American street scene, while the webcam on the Mexican side seems to always show a scene very similar to what we can see in the satellite shot.

In the webcams you might also spot one of the 4 million pedestrians who cross the bridge on foot each year.

Laredo International Bridge 2, or officially the Juárez-Lincoln International Bridge (Wikipedia), was built in 1976 to alleviate traffic on the first bridge, and is only open to buses and non-commercial traffic.

Slightly shorter at 307 m it has six lanes, four or which head north into the US. All four northbound lanes appear to be continually gridlocked, which is hardly surprising when you hear that over 4 million non-commercial vehicles cross here every year.

Google’s Street View car never got close enough to see the bridge itself, but we can see the front of the border control building from a distance.

Next up is the Laredo International Bridge 3, or Colombia-Solidarity International Bridge (Wikipedia), which has eight lanes this time and of all the bridges so far carries the most commercial traffic - around 270,000 vehicles each year.

Our final road bridge is the Laredo International Bridge 4, or World Trade International Bridge (Wikipedia), which despite also having eight lanes, is only open to commercial vehicles - a LOT of them. In the past year this bridge has been crossed by nearly 1.2 million commercial vehicles.

It’s not only road bridges that connect the two countries here either - there’s also the Laredo International Railway Bridge, or Texas-Mexican Railway International Bridge (Wikipedia) which connects the Texas Mexican Railway in the US with Mexico’s Kansas City Railway.

Ironically, unlike the road bridges, the Google Street View car got close enough to the railway bridge for a photo opportunity.

As if that wasn’t enough bridges, plans are already underway for the construction of yet another road bridge and two more railway bridges.

For the full breakdown of statistical data about these bridges, see this traffic distribution chart at cityoflaredo.com.

Congratulations to Fraser, who finally got a suggestion published.

The town of Progreso, Mexico, sits on a limestone shelf that falls away extremely gradually as it gets further out to sea. As a result, when they built a pier to allow cruise ships to dock here, it had to be long. Really long.

Measuring a phenomenal 6.5 kilometers (4 miles), this is the world’s longest pier.

The original pier was completed in 1942, and despite being little more than a two-lane highway, is actually quite nice looking seen from the beach. In this satellite shot you can clearly see where the original construction ends, and the more recent one begins.¹

Cruise ships dock here for a day or two to allow the tourists to visit some of the nearby archaeological sites, and we can see there’s one berthed here at the moment. Tourists need to take a bus to shore, which takes nearly 10 minutes!

The pier also plays a major part in the local container industry - we can see loads of them stacked on the pier - and there’s also a tanker here just now too.

For more long piers, see our previous posts on England’s 2.1 km Southend Pier (the world’s longest pleasure pier) and Australia’s 1.8 km Busselton Jetty².

Thanks to cboone and Michael.

A strange procession is moving through the streets of Los Reyes Acozac in Mexico - the fuselages of not one, but two aircraft!

As they’re roughly 100 feet in length, the giant plane bodies could be for Boeing 737s - but what would they be doing here? 737 fuselages are usually made in Wichita, Kansas, so it’s a bit of a mystery why they would be in convoy through Mexico.

Discussions on the Google Earth community suggest the fuselages could actually be for McDonnell Douglas DC9/10s - which went out of production decades ago - so maybe they’re being scrapped somewhere round here?

If they are scrap, hopefully they won’t be abandoned on the road as happened to one Boeing 737 making its way through Mumbai traffic last year…

Thanks to carmedic.