When viewed from above, much of the landscape of South Carolina is clearly covered in mysterious oval depressions that aren’t obvious from ground level. Known as “Carolina Bays”, nobody really knows how these unique geological features were formed.

Despite their name, Carolina Bays can also be found in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, and northcentral Florida. They vary in size from one to several thousand acres, and are often gathered in groups. Many are filled with water and named as lakes, but most contain vegetated wetland.

Most striking however, is that every single one is invariably aligned in almost exactly same direction - which has led some people to claim that they might be the result of a meteor impact. It would have to have been a pretty serious impact, as there are estimated to be over 500,000 of them. This is Lake Waccamaw, north Carolina, which is widely considered the largest Carolina bay.

George Howard (a bit of a Carolina Bay fanatic), has created an exhaustive KML file that marks the location of many thousands of the bays in North Carolina. This image was taken in Google Earth, and shows the white outlines that have been used to mark the locations.

So, who here can solve the mystery of the Carolina Bays?

You can read more about Carolina Bays at Wikipedia. Thanks to Keith Wright, david and Ogle Earth.

Welcome to day four of Google Sightseeing Reader Takeover Week! Every day this week, one of you has been chosen to have their very own sight posted here on GSS, while Alex and James take a well deserved holiday. Today’s sight is from Zack!

Bomb Island, also named Lunch Island, is located in Lake Murray which is west of Columbia, South Carolina.

A 1.5-mile-long earthen dam, the largest in the world when it was built, created Lake Murray, named for William S. Murray, chief engineer for the project.

The Purple Martin roost on Bomb Island is the largest roost in North America with 700,000 to 800,000 birds present at the peak of pre-migration in late July. A most unusual event happens each year as thousands of Purple Martins return to this island to roost for the summer. The island has been declared a bird sanctuary and it is quite a sight to watch these birds return to Bomb Island each day around sunset. People around the lake construct Purple Martin houses, or clusters of gourds, to attract the nesting birds. Purple Martins are the largest North American member of the swallow family and, like other swallows; their diet consists of flying insects.

Pilots in World War 2 used Bomb Island and surrounding islands for bombing practice. Some of these bomber crews flew with General James H. Doolittle’s Raiders on April 18, 1942 when they bombed Tokyo.

Sixty–two years after plunging into Lake Murray, one of the last remaining Army Air Corps warplanes has been rescued from 150 feet beneath the lake’s surface. The final day of the airplane is well known. After flying out of the Columbia Army Air Base on April 4, 1943, the now–rare B–25C Bomber crashed and sank in the man–made lake during a skip–bombing training mission. The military crew escaped the aircraft, which had lost power, and brought it to rest upright, with damage to only the right engine. The crew survived and was rescued. The airplane will be at the Southern Museum of Flight in Birmingham, Alabama. There, the plane will be restored, conserved, and displayed in its public museum.

Check out this fantastic capture of a plane towing a banner message past a packed beach in Italy.

Here’s another plane towing a message off the coast of South Carolina (where there’s also a great shot of someone parasailing too).

I don’t know what messages these planes were flying, but at North Perry Airport in Florida someone’s left one of these plane-banners lying out, and you can clearly read the message “CAT I LOVE, YO!“…

Thanks to mlc1us, nicolor and Mark Ralston.

The BMW world headquarters in Munich, Germany is the ‘four-cylinder’ building (which was built top-down), while the famous logo is atop the BMW museum.

Over in South Carolina is BMW’s North American home. The rather-cool crescent moon shaped building is the BMW Zentrum, the only BMW museum in North America, and sits next to the only BMW manufacturing facility in the United States.

The factory exclusively builds the Z4 roadsters and X5 sports activity vehicles which are then distibuted worldwide via the Port of Brunswick. You can clearly see the hundreds of Beemers waiting to be shipped out.

Thanks: James, Jacob Tomaw, Carson Diltz, Paul, Jochen, Giampaolo Bellavite & Alex

Another strangely beautiful shot of six cooling towers. This one is at Catawaba Nuclear Power Station in South Carolina.

Paramount’s Carowinds theme park is on the border of North and South Carolina. Some of the rides look great from up here - check out the giant rollercoaster at the North-West corner, which looks like it might be the wooden ‘Hurler‘. Apparently rollercoaster junkies say that wooden ‘coasters are the best…

Thanks to Adrian Likins for this one.