The Arches National Park in Utah, USA, is an area of unique geological formations, most famous for the huge abundance of naturally formed sandstone arches, of which over 2,000 have been formed due to the gradual erosion of the rock.

The most famous of the natural arches here is Delicate Arch, which features on Utah license plates, but unfortunately isn’t all that impressive looking from above.

Landscape Arch on the other hand is impressively big - its span is over 90 metres (300 feet)!

We can also clearly see Natural Arch - it’s the pale saddle shaped one here. I get the impression it’s more awe inspiring in real life!

The National Park features many other fascinating formations, including Balanced Rock, which is described as “a large balancing rock, the size of three school buses”. You can see the shadow of the huge rock in this thumbnail image.

Finally we come to the Fiery Furnace — an area of maze-like narrow passages and tall rock columns which (much like the biblical story from which it gets its name), is easily survivable. As long as you’re on the ranger-guided tour that is.

Also see our older posts on the Rainbow Bridge, Utah and the Devil’s Tower, Wyoming. You can read more about The Arches National Park at Wikipedia or see ground level pictures at Flickr.

Thanks to Cortney Moody, Jeff Alu, Jens Kilian, Jens Kilian, Michael Lustig, Roland Bock, woowoowoo, Jason Wolfe, Stuart and Steve Bryson.

The Google Lat Long blog has announced that Google has just added 12 more US cities to their street view coverage, bringing their total coverage to, um.. lots. The new cities added are as follows:

• Albany and Schenectady, NY
• Boise, ID
• Juneau, AK
• Kansas City, MO
• Manchester, NH
• Milwaukee, WI
• Research Triangle Park (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill), NC
• San Antonio, TX
• Salt Lake City, UT

And presumably just for today (because today is Valentine’s Day in case you’d forgotten), it seems the little Street View guy is standing on a little love heart.

Aww, puke.

This is the gargantuan Bingham Canyon Mine - an open-pit copper, gold, silver and molybdenum mine near Salt Lake City, Utah.

In full-scale production since 1906, the pit is over 0.75 miles (1.2 km) deep, 2.5 miles (4 km) wide, and covers 1,900 acres (7.7 km²), making it the largest open-pit copper mine in the world, and the world’s largest man-made excavation.

All along the road to the sensibly named mining town of Copperton, we can see the absolutely massive 3 million dollar dump trucks - which are among the largest trucks in the world. Used to transport the raw ore their huge size is a necessity, as by 2004 the mine had produced more than 17 million tons of copper - more copper than any other mine in the world.

See these older posts for more mining related enormity: Casa Grande Copper Mine, Siberian Diamond Mine, The Longest Conveyor Belt in the World, Bucket-Wheel Excavators, Berkeley Pit, Tetraeder Bottrop and Lavender Pit.

Thanks to Dr. Ed Data, Kristian Twombly, Kevin Byrne, John S., Steve Hulet, Zachary and RodneyG

This is the bizarre Spiral Jetty, a huge piece of land art on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Built of mud, salt crystals, basalt rocks and earth, it forms a 1500 foot long (~450 metre), 15-foot wide counterclockwise coil, which extends from the lake shore. It was actually entirely submerged by rising lake waters for many years, but due to lowering water levels, has since re-emerged.

Spiral Jetty was built all the way back in 1970 by the late American sculptor Robert Smithson, who also created some other pieces of land art which are still visible on Google Earth, including the 1971 piece Spiral Hill, Broken Circle in Emmen, Holland.

See other spirals on GSS, and read more about Spiral Jetty at Wikipedia.

Thanks to Dan Blue and Mike Shubeck.

Free UK daily paper The Metro published an article last week about a YouTube video¹ in which someone claimed to have found the shape of Jesus in a cloud, floating over Mount Sinai in Egypt.

We thought this was such a blatant (and totally lame) rip-off of our own Face of Jesus Found in Sand Dune that we’d better up the ante!²

First in Utah, we find a terrifying looking skull face…

Then in Nevada, we’ve got a Blues Brothers style one-eyed alien…

And finally in Kenya we’ve got… the Rock Eater Biter from the NeverEnding Story!

How long before the Metro steals this story I wonder?

See our other related posts for even more Google Earth Pareidolia:

• Irish Rock Face
• Face of Santa Claus
• Native American Listening to an iPod
• The Face of Mother Earth
• The Simian Messiah
• Face of Jesus Found in Sand Dune

Thanks to Jayden Brown, Vaughn Nelson and cruzito.

I awoke this morning to find my email inbox bursting with messages along the lines of “OMFG! On Digg there’s a Google Map showing a CRUISE MISSILE in flight!!!!!!!!!one”.

And it was true! While I was asleep over 2500 people Dugg what, at first glance, does look like a cruise missile over Utah. But look closer and you’ll see it’s nothing more than an aeroplane with black wings. Oh well…

Thanks: Rob Monroe, Jonathan Seidman, Trevor, Marco Olivo, Paul B (on fark.com), Zach Penland & Martyn Cox

Surrounded on three sides by mountain ranges, this is the eerie and desolate Dugway Proving Grounds, a large-scale biological and chemical agent testing grounds south of Salt Lake City, Utah. The US has tested all sorts of nasty things here over the last 65 years including flame throwers, chemical spray systems, biological warfare weapons and toxic agents.

Encompassing around 32 3200 km², there’s a large area of high-resolution imagery to the east which contains various empty structures including this spooky-looking thing.

Here’s some links for you: The Dugway Official Site, some ground level photos of the area and of course the obligatory Wikipedia page!

Thanks to Phillip Lockwood-Holmes and Matthew.

I was reading some old comments on the site and rediscovered this fabulous swirling water on Lake Powell. However this beautiful sight isn’t quite as innocent as it first seems.

On closer inspection you can identify the boat that’s causing this swirl, and taking a wander around the area turns up another one, followed by a whole flotilla. This initially deserted-looking landscape is in fact overrun with people - none of whom would be here if several environmental organisations had their way.

Lake Powell is actually a man-made reservoir, which was created by the flooding of Glen Canyon with the Colorado River - an engineering feat accomplished and maintained by the controversial Glen Canyon Dam. Despite the obvious possibilities for damage to the area’s ecosystem, Lake Powell is arguably one of the most beautiful lakes in the whole of America, and each year over 2 million people get to see sights like the Rainbow Bridge, which would otherwise be too remote for most of them to reach.

But reducing the amount of people who make it here might not be such a bad thing of course. Quite apart from the tourist presence upsetting the local Navajo (who consider the Rainbow Bridge an important religious site), it seems that the waters of Lake Powell are further eroding the foundations of the Rainbow Bridge.

Thanks to Jen, JDP and Goomerator.