Within the Sonoran Desert National Monument, Arizona, is one of the largest stockpiles of discarded vehicle tyres¹ in the US - perhaps as many as 10 million individual tyres.

Despite being just south of a town called Goodyear, this is actually the work of a company called Envirotech Industries International, who have been collecting tyres here for the last 10 years.

The company used to recycle the tyres, and intended to start converting the old tyres into fuel - until the state of Arizona closed them down for multiple serious fire-code violations. Envirotech subsequently went bankrupt, leaving the State of Arizona responsible for the facility.

The imagery at Microsoft’s Live service has better resolution, allowing us to see individual tyres that have fallen from the huge piles (one of the breaches of the fire regulations was “Obstructed fire roads”).

If a fire were to break out here, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office have stated that it could “burn unhindered for over ten years”. To put that into perspective, in 1999 it took 250 firefighters 5 days to get a fire at a facility in Ohio under control - and it took a further nine years and more than $32 million to clean up the mess.

There are an estimated 3 billion waste tires stockpiled in the United States, and when they catch fire the environmental fallout can be catastrophic. Government reports stated that the pollution from the 1999 Ohio fire killed more than 10,000 fish in a nearby creek.

The Sonoran Desert National Monument is a small part of the 311,000 km² Sonoran Desert - home to several endangered species, and the most biologically diverse of all the North American deserts.

Read the full story at azcentral.com.

Thanks to kjfitz.

Air Force One is the callsign for any aircraft that has the President of the United States on board, most commonly one of two specially adapted Boeing 747s.

One of them is seen here in Yuma, Arizona, where the President was making a speech about Immigration Control on May 18, 2006 (Yuma is on the US/Mexican border).

(Incidentally, there are lots of Police closing all of the roads south of Yuma on Avenue B, so the President’s motorcade must be around there somewhere!)

The fleet consists of two Boeing 747-200B aircraft, designated VC-25, specially fitted to enable the President and his entourage to conduct its business from the air. Inside, there are separate areas for the media, Secret Service and the President’s family, which includes bathrooms and dining quarters. Unlike a regular Boeing 747-400, the VC-25 can refuel in midair.

Usually its home is Andrews Air Force Base, Washington DC. The ‘President’s Wing’ can hold both of the VC-25 aircraft, as well as 3 Marine One helicopters.

In order to train the Secret Service how to protect the President when he is onboard, there is a mockup VC-25 at the James J. Rowley Training Center, near Washington DC, as well as a mockup of Marine One next to it. Once in the air however, it’s up to the anti-missile systems and electromagnetic pulse resistors to keep it safe.

Naturally, there is much more information on Air Force One over at Wikipedia. There’s even a nice floor plan available. If you really want to get a good look inside, the film Air Force One is said to have a particularly accurate recreation of the interior.

Thanks to Aaron, Adam J, Airman, Cr@X, Dan Hadad, david, gmr2048, KLashNekOff, PapaPenguin, patrick, PoopyPants, Rob, Siavash Shiva, SnowManson, Stephan, Tim, Travis Mitchell and TVGenius.

Last week Google updated their Street View coverage to include Chicago, Pittsburgh, Portland, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Tucson - bringing the total number of Street View cities up to 15.

So far the most dramatic discovery in these new images has been made in Phoenix, Arizona, where the Google Street View Van has come across a pretty serious accident involving a Range Rover and an Audi in a collision at a junction.

Dramatically, the speed of the impact has actually flipped the Range Rover right over onto its roof. Fortunately however it doesn’t look like there were any serious injuries on this occasion, as by the time the Google Van approaches a policemen is already on scene, but there doesn’t appear to be an ambulance around anywhere.

So can anyone work out exactly what happened here?

Thanks to Fraser.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a new something-shaped swimming pool here on Google Sightseeing.

So, just in time for the summer holidays, here’s a swimming pool in the shape of a Baseball bat with a smaller, ball shaped, jacuzzi pool alongside.

Now a golf resort, this hotel was originally built as a spring training camp for the San Francisco Giants. Other baseball related features are the diamond shaped car park (since expanded) and a tower which resembles a baseball cap.

More info on the hotel’s history.

Previous pools: Planes, Dolphins, Guitars, Hearts and Swords.

Thanks: Brett

The KT Palmer Sundial is the largest in North America, described well at The Big Waste of Space. As sundials were primarily designed for telling the time it should be easy to find out when this satellite photograph was taken.

By my measurements the shadow of the sundial is at 337 degrees or 11 hours 14 minutes¹. To translate this to the local time we must adjust for the sundial’s location on the Earth by following the instructions in this article.

Arizona is Mountain Standard Time (MST), which is GMT - 7 so the centre longitude is 105 degrees West. The sundial is 111.9 degrees West, and we need to adjust by 4 minutes for every degree off centre. That means our sundial is 27 minutes and 36 seconds behind local clocks and watches.

Next, we have to adjust for the “Equation of Time”, which means we need to know the exact day this photo was taken. As it’s a Digital Globe picture, we can find it in the archive where they date the photo to March 12 2005. Looking up this table we need to subtract 9m and 42s².

Sticking it all together I therefore conclude that this satellite picture was taken at 10:36:42 MST on March 12th 2005!

The other day I caught the end of the video for the awful London Bridge by Fergie and I noticed that Fergie and her crew were dancing around in front of London’s most famous bridge and the image of a million postcards: Tower Bridge.

It was clear that Fergie had fallen for the same trick that Londoners have been playing on Americans for years, confusing them between the grand Tower Bridge and its much more boring neighbor London Bridge.

The most famous example is that of Robert P. McCulloch, American entrepreneur and owner of McCulloch Oil, who in 1968 paid $2,460,000 to have the then-collapsing London Bridge dismantled and shipped right across the world to be rebuilt in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. He later claimed it not to be true, but everyone knows that he thought he was buying Tower Bridge. Numpty.

Although clearly not much to look at, London Bridge is the second most popular tourist destination in the state of Arizona. For more info see the previous GgSs coverage of Tower Bridge and Wikipedia for London Bridge.

Thanks: Ben & Shea MarshaLL

This is the Lavender Pit, part of the Copper Queen Mine in Bisbee, Arizona. The Phelps Dodge Corporation began work on this huge hole in 1951, but they had to move 46 million tons of material before they reached the copper.

However, by 1975 over one billion tons of copper had been successfully extracted, at which point the price of copper plummeted, and the whole mine was closed.

Given that the demand for copper is currently rising again (and therefore the price), I wonder which bright spark will try to reopen one of these ecological disasters first?

Read more about the Lavender Pit at Wikipedia.

Thanks to Jeff and John B.

This is the Tonto Natural Bridge near Payson, AZ - which is less like a natural bridge and more like a natural tunnel.

The creekbed disappears into the 50 metre-high tunnel for around 120 metres - the two entrances you can see in our thumbnails, and the inside of which you can see in numerous online galleries. (I’ve chosen this gallery to link to, because I like the way they’ve gone over the top with arty-farty photoshop filters )

Thanks to Jason Creach.