It’s Island Week 4 here at GSS, which means we’ll mostly be posting about Islands. For about a week.

On September 29, 2009, just south of the islands that make up the Independent State of Samoa in Polynesia, an earthquake measuring 8.0 on the Moment Magnitude scale occurred, which generated a tsunami that swept across the nearby islands killing at least 149 people.

Most of the victims were on Samoa itself, where reports of a wave between 3 and 10 metres have emerged. Many low-lying areas in the Samoan islands have been completely destroyed, including the Prime Minister’s home village of Lepa.

Several other Polynesian islands were affected including the Unincorporated U.S. Territory of American Samoa to the east, where they lost at least 25 people, and to the south Tonga, where 6 people are so far known to have died.

Just 16 hours after the Samoan tsunami, another large earthquake occurred just off the southern coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. This eruption registered a lower moment magnitude reading of 7.6, but even without a tsunami has still claimed at least 1,100 lives.

Separated by 9,749 km, these two earthquakes were unrelated. They also lie on separate faults; Samoa sits just north of the Tonga Trench, and Sumatra is located on one of the world’s most active fault lines, the Great Sumatran fault.

What the two earthquakes do share however, is that all the affected islands fall within the Pacific Ring of Fire, a 40,000 km long horseshoe-shaped region that is defined by a nearly continuous path of volcanic features, including 452 volcanoes. 75% of the world’s active and dormant volcanoes are located within the region, and together they are responsible for about 90% of the world’s earthquakes.

More information is available at Wikipedia about the 2009 Samoa earthquake, the 2009 Padang earthquake, and the Pacific Ring of Fire.

It’s Island Week 4 here at GSS, which means we’ll mostly be posting about Islands. For about a week.

North Brother Island, home to many decaying and abandoned structures, sits just off shore of New York’s Manhattan borough in the East River. Now home to a few crumbling Gothic buildings, it once housed the Riverside Hospital, and is undoubtedly the creepiest island in New York City.

Largely ignored until the late 19th century, North Brother Island did not see permanent settlement until the construction of the Riverside Hospital was completed in 1885. The hospital was built to house those suffering from infections diseases like cholera, typhoid, and smallpox as well as a constantly rotating staff of doctors and nurses.

In order to keep the island’s patients from infecting the rest of the city’s population, it was kept relatively isolated – a small ferry was the only mode of transport for hospital staff and supplies.

As the island’s population grew, additional dormitories and a tuberculosis pavilion were constructed. At its height during an 1892 typhus outbreak, North Brother Island held over 1,200 patients, many housed in makeshift tents.

Perhaps the most infamous patient of the Riverside Hospital was Mary Mallon, known as Typhoid Mary. A cook at various Manhattan restaurants in the early 1900s, Mary also carried Typhoid. After infecting a total of 53 people she was committed to Riverside Hospital and lived out the rest of her life in an isolated cottage on the island.

Riverside Hospital continued to treat victims of infectious disease and later, drug addiction, until it was permanently shut down in 1963 due to a staff corruption scandal. Over the past 40 years, North Brother has been left to decay into its current horror-movie-esque state and is now off limits to the public.

For more information and some great pictures, check out this blog.

Thanks to Edvado, yusaku and Katerina Korch.

The Alameda Trench is a 16-km train route which runs 10m below ground-level through the centre of Los Angeles.

Trains descend into the trench near Greenleaf Boulevard in the south and rise back to the surface at 25th Street to the north. It runs parallel to Alameda Street, from which it takes its name.

Before the trench was completed, trains up to 2.5km long would have to slowly pass through around 200 grade-level crossings (i.e. no bridges or tunnels), which resulted in considerable traffic holdups and pollution from stopped vehicles. Since the $2.4billion construction project was completed in 2002, the trench has significantly eased congestion through central Los Angeles.

The struts across the trench – clearly visible from above, and on street view – are intended to maintain the integrity of the concrete walls during California’s frequent earthquakes¹.

The trench is part of the Alameda Corridor which takes 30-60 trains per day from the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles to locations across the United States – accounting for up to 1/4 of all consumer products imports. Design and construction is underway for an expansion to the east, into San Gabriel.

Somewhat surprisingly, given the number and length of trains which pass through the trench, none are visible on Google Maps. We can, however, see some on Bing Maps’ Bird’s Eye View. And this Youtube video gives you a sense of what it’s like to travel through the trench which is only used for freight traffic (though some ceremonial passenger trains did run through the Corridor on its opening day).

In Indiana, the local farmers have an apparently long tradition of decorating the roofs of their barns with interesting pictures. I haven’t been able to find much information on the historical reasons why they do this, but the steeply angled roofs mean that the images are pretty clearly visible from ground level – so presumably they make for fairly good advertising hoardings.

There are tons of these decorated roofs all over the Midwestern United States, but today we’ll be limiting ourselves to ones found in Indiana, because otherwise we’d be here forever.

Based purely on the number of roofs that depict cows, I’m going to guess that there are a lot of dairy farmers in Indiana. They’re also pretty big on pigs too.

The number of properties featuring horses is pretty impressive, but there are probably even more depictions of a more modern type of workhorse, the tractor.

You know, I think I’m starting to see some common themes here. Is anyone else getting a farmyard vibe? Oh look, another tractor. Except this time, it says “MAKIN BACON”! Cool.

People do seem to have eventually started to get slightly more adventurous however, as these two roofs demonstrate through their use of “scenery”.

Of course there are occasional properties where the owners have promoted some different species, such as ducks, chickens, and deer.

Actually that’s not all, mustn’t forget the multi-coloured llamas.

It seems that some people have recognised that there isn’t much original work happening in the Indiana roof-art scene, which may explain this excellent bit of Disney copyright infringement.

Presumably this next one was also created in the name of art – unless they really do breed Unicorns round these parts?

For more roof art than you could possibly imagine, check out Ohio Barns.com. Thanks to Adriano and Felippo.

Previously on Google Sightseeing: Happy Magic Rainbow Unicorn.

Bullfighting traces its history way back to when the Romans held public spectacles of “Man vs Beast”, and although France and Portugal both have long bullfight histories, it is considered a very Spanish tradition.

So it’s in Spain where we start with the world’s oldest surviving bullring: Las Virtudes in Santa Cruz de Mudela. It was built way back in 1641, when the bullrings were actually bullsquares – the round shape was adopted later on to prevent the action being confined to the corners.

The style of Spanish bullfighting has changed very little since 1726, when Francisco Romero got off of his horse to fight on foot with the famous red cape and sword.

This tradition was taken with the emigrants to the Americas, where the oldest remaining bullring can be dated back to 1766. By now firmly set on the round shape, Plaza de Acho in Lima, Peru accommodates 13,000 spectators.

Back in Spain, we find the second largest bullring in the world, Las Ventas in Madrid. With a capacity for 25,000 spectators, it has also been used for an AC/DC concert, and hosted a semi-final of 2008’s Davis Cup tennis tournament¹.

To find the largest bullring in the world, we visit what was once the most populated city on the planet: Mexico City. Here we find the gigantic La Plaza Monumental, built in 1946 with a capacity for 41,262 people.

For obvious reasons, bullfighting has drawn a lot of criticism throughout the world, and I’m surprised that these massive venues are still able to draw enough crowds to keep the tradition alive.

However, there are signs that bullfighting will not be around forever: it is no longer televised in Spain, and many opinion polls have shown the majority of the public are just not interested.

In Tijuana, Mexico we can use Google Earth’s historical imagery to see before and after shots of a recently demolished bullring that wasn’t pulling in enough business.

Earlier this year the city of Viana do Castelo in Portugal took the bold step of banning bullfights altogether. Their small ancient bullring will now be used as a “science and education centre”. Presumably bull dissections will not be part of the cirriculum.

This entry is based on an original article from the recently re-launched Google Sightseeing Español, where new author Luis Moreno is posting translated sights from here and original Spanish-langauge content.