As yet there hasn’t been an official announcement, but today has nevertheless seen a ton of new Street View imagery released right across the world.

The biggest news is that Singapore has received coverage for the first time, becoming the third Asian country to get coverage after Japan and Taiwan earlier this year.

Raffles Hotel in Singapore

Canada, which has only had Street View for a couple of months, has just been blessed¹ with new coverage of Edmonton, Hamilton, London (Ontario), Saskatoon, St. John’s, Sudbury, Winnipeg and Victoria!

BC Parliament Buildings, ‎Victoria

That’s not all either – remember when Google asked for the UK public’s feedback on where the Google Trike should go next? Well the imagery has been released and they’ve visited some of the most iconic off-road locations across the country! We’re posting them all to our twitter feed today, but we’ll be rounding them all up later on too.

The original Stonehenge

Expect to see loads of funny, crude, rude and fascinating new sights posted to our Twitter feed in the coming weeks! If you don’t already, you really should follow us on Twitter!

Thanks to Google Maps Mania and Mapperz

Ah, New York City… it can easily be thought of as one of the busiest, most congested places on the planet. Its miles and miles of blacktop are usually covered with thousands of people shuffling furiously from one place to the next. On GSS’s last visit, we came across this poor kid who seemed to buckle under the pressure!

However, nestled deep inside New York’s concrete canyons you can still find a few places that take you back to the past. These buildings were built in a simpler time when things weren’t quite as hectic, and yet they survived as the big city grew up around them.

The oldest building in New York City is the Pieter Claesen Wyckoff House. It’s believed to have been built in 1652. Today it sits in Milton Fidler Park, right between a junkyard and a McDonald’s!

Our next stop is the John Bowne House located in Queens. It was built around 1661 and was the site of a Quaker meeting in 1662¹. The Bowne family lived in the house until 1945, when they turned it over to the Bowne Historical Society². Today, the building sits right under the approach path for busy LaGuardia airport, which is less than 2 miles to the west.

The Frederick Van Cortlandt House in the Bronx was built in 1748. The family used the land around the house to establish a grain plantation. The house was also used during the American Revolutionary War. Today, the land has been preserved and converted to a public park, and the house has been a museum since 1897.

Right across the street from Ground Zero sits St. Paul’s Chapel. The chapel was built in 1766 and is the oldest surviving church building in the city of New York³. While recovery efforts were underway after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the chapel served as a place of rest and refuge for recovery workers.

Finally, to give you an idea of how much times have changed over the years, we visit the Mount Vernon Hotel Museum. It was completed in 1799 and was built as a means of “escape” from busy city life. At the time New York City only extended down to 14th street, so this location was actually considered “out in the country” for the city’s residents. Over time, the city grew and the building became a museum in 1933 1939. Today the building sits in New York’s Lenox Hill community, right down the street from the south end of Central Park.

Check Wikipedia for more information about these structures and a full list of the oldest buildings in New York City.

Thanks to Terri.

It’s not uncommon to stumble across some interesting sights and shapes when you browse through Google Maps, but there’s something special about stumbling across forest clearings that surely must be man-made, but there’s no obvious reason for the recognisable shapes!

In southern Poland, outside the town of Bokowno, we find the shape of a north arrow carved out of the nearby woods. It measures close to a massive 525 metres from one end to the other, and appears to be lined-up perfectly in a north direction. There are two sand production facilities nearby, so perhaps the arrow is used by one of these companies?

Outside of Pensaukee, Wisconsin you will find the word FOWL grown into the shoreline of Lake Michigan. Is this perhaps a warning to passing planes that there may be geese and ducks around?

In Oregon’s Umpqua National Forest, there appear to be two dice cut into the trees. Could this be tied into a local environmental project? Or perhaps it’s something to whet the appetites of air travellers en-route to Las Vegas, which is almost exactly 1,000 km to the south east.

Can anyone shed any light on these bizarre forest formations?

Also see our previous forest art posts on sharks, fonts and very large writing!

Thanks to Gabor Doka, Kendall, Mastboy, Mark, local_gurl, Derek, Denny, Mr. P, and Max.

We took a look at the world of huge cruise ships early in 2008. However, the recent launch of Royal Caribbean’s MS Oasis of the Seas is changing the world of cruising.

This 360m long, 72m high behemoth weighing 220,000 tons was constructed in Turku, Finland, where unfortunately Google only has very low resolution images. However, we’re fairly sure that the white rectangle in the centre of this image is the Oasis! Panoramio has numerous photos of the ship under construction.

Designed to carry up to 6,300 passengers and over 2,000 crew, this ship is almost 50% larger than the Freedom class vessels mentioned in our previous post. It is so large that, soon after delivery, it faced a major obstacle in the form of the Great Belt Fixed Link bridge in Denmark. The Oasis had to safely pass under this bridge in order to reach the North Sea.

Her retractable funnels were lowered as much as possible, but still she had to build up speed to ride low enough in the water to pass under the bridge with less than 60cm to spare! A pair of YouTube videos show how perilous this was – from on board the ship, and from land.

After surviving this first test, the Oasis crossed the Atlantic to its home port of Port Everglades in Florida, from where it will cruise the Caribbean starting in December. It will be joined by a sister ship, MS Allure of the Seas, in 2010.

In addition to now-standard activities such as surf simulators and climbing walls, passengers will enjoy numerous ground-breaking cruise ship features such as an open air central park (with real trees and grass) running the length of the ship, ‘loft’ cabins and a bar which travels up and down between decks. There is also 25m zipline and a boardwalk (with carousel and tattoo parlour) leading to an outdoor theatre for aquatic shows with a spectacular backdrop of the open ocean.

Most cruises will call in at Labadee – Royal Caribbean’s ‘private island’ – in reality a fenced-off peninsula on Haiti’s northern coast, where workers are rushing to finish construction on a pier long enough to accommodate these new ships.

While this fake tourism would be unbearable by many, 500 locals directly benefit from employment or from selling their wares at the ‘flea market’, and Haiti’s poverty-strapped government happily rakes in $6 for each passenger. At other ports, locals and visitors alike complain about overcrowding when multiple ships are in port on the same day. This new generation of ships may only increase this problem, as well as the usual environmental concerns of fuel usage and the effect on coral reefs and wildlife.

Marine Buzz has an excellent article about the Oasis, while USA Today has some great pictures of the construction process.

If you ever need reminded of just how powerful Mother Nature can be, look no further than the city of Greensburg, Kansas.

A small community in the heart of the United States, Greensburg has had its share of severe conditions over the years. Now, thanks to the differing image capture dates, we’re able to see a dramatic before and after comparison of the most extreme weather to hit the town in its history.

The aerial view of the city shows a community very similar to many other towns scattered across the Kansas countryside. Switching to street view however is an entirely different story. On May 4, 2007, over 95 percent of the city was destroyed when a 2.7 km (1.7 mile) wide EF5 tornado¹ ripped through town. The National Weather Service recorded 330km/h (220mph) winds during the storm, which sadly killed 11 people.²

Driving around town in the virtual street car, it’s hard to find a single thing built before the tornado that remains standing today. Most of the structures visible in street view, including the water tower, were subsequently rebuilt.

Greensburg is home to the world’s largest hand dug well, which is 33 m (109 ft) deep and nearly 10 metres (32 ft) across.³ Known as the “Big Well”, its associated museum was completely destroyed by the winds, but a 450 kg meteorite stored in the museum survived, and was found a few days later in amongst the rubble⁴.

Greensburg today is rebuilding as a “green” town. Reconstruction is being accomplished with ecologically-sound building supplies. A new factory is being built near town to manufacture ultra-green modular homes, and the city will be breaking ground on a facility for four 2.5-MW wind turbines to handle all their power needs. Maybe the city’s name is a coincidence, but Greensburg may soon be the greenest town in America.

Information about the Greensburg tornado can be found on Wikipedia, and you can read about Greensburg’s rebuilding effort on their website.