The Longest Conveyor Belt in the World
Tuesday, 15th August 2006 by Alex Turnbull
Guess where The Longest Conveyor Belt in the World is? Western Sahara of course.
(More than half of the conveyor is in high-res, but the particularly cool section shown here has been captured in super high-res as part of the National Geographic Megaflyover project.)
The conveyor is 100 kilometres long and runs all the way to the coast from the phosphate mines of Bu Craa (which sounds a lot like a George Lucas place name to me).
If we zoom quite far out (to help grasp the scale of this massive machine) it looks distinctly like a lot of phosphate has been lost to the Saharan winds...
Thanks: Carlos Vlc.
About the author
Alex has decided that his title will be Senior Vice President of Stuff.
The start of the conveyor belt, at the mines, is also at high-res, and pretty interesting – https://www.googlesightseeing.com/maps?p=&c=&t=k&hl=en&ll=26.318104,-12.851794&z=17 – and I found some ground photos of a different but similar installation – http://www.mining-technology.com/projects/benguearir/benguearir7.html
There is also the wikipedia article about Bou Craa – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bou_Craa
The conveyor belt was installed by Krupp, and it’s comprised of 11 separate sections.
Then do you suppose all of this is broken pieces of the belt? Maybe damaged during one of the 1970’s attacks? hmmm
I found some (old) ground photos of the Bu Craa mines: http://www.sahara-mili.net/lugar/bucraa.htm (looks like they are dating from the pre-1975 time, when the region was still under spanish control)
And here as well http://www.lasonet.com/sahara/sh-10.htm (lots of pictures from the spanish times, but navigation is not easy)
there are many places around Sahara that sound like Star Wars locations, especially around this area: View Placemark (not by chance, of course…)