Grande Dixence Dam
Friday, 12th October 2007 by Alex Turnbull
Completed all the way back in 1935, this is the Grande Dixence Dam which holds back the Lac des Dix, a 4 km long lake in the Val d'Hérens, Switzerland. The water mainly comes from the summer melt of glaciers, and is piped here via a system of water supply tunnels over 100 km long.
What's really interesting is that in summer the Lac des Dix can be up to 284 metres deep1 - thanks to the fact that at 285 metres tall, the Grande Dixence is the world's tallest dam.
Update: It turns out that this is actually the world's 2nd tallest dam. See my comment for more info. Thanks to Gary for the correction.
Thanks to Joel.
About the author
Alex has decided that his title will be Senior Vice President of Stuff.
Did we have a bit of downtime there? 😉
google satellite view appears to be down. anyone else having this problem?
Um, no problems here guys? Rob do you mean with our site? mysteron do you also mean with ours?
Yeah, GSS was down for about 3 days.
I can report no problems with Google Maps either.
Alex: Yep, the site had some sort of db error for just over 2 days (it seemed like that!), saying “Guru Meditation”.
So, why is it no one ever seems to care anymore? That water shot is obviously not water and the Google (do no evil) censors are not even trying to make stuff look real anymore.
Wow, that’s incredibly weird. I’ve been checking and using the site continually over the past few days (I was wondering why no-one had commented on this post yet!) and never had a single problem?
James (backend supremo) is actually in New York at the moment, but thanks for letting us know – he’ll look into it when he gets back.
Personal: that is water, the shot is not in incredibly high resolution so it looks discolored because of the reflection of the light.
Actually its the 5th tallest dam in the world. The Rogun dam in Tajikistan is the tallest at 335m.
@Personal: the images for most of Switzerland have this odd coloring. The data comes via a company who run map.search.ch. That site had reasonably high-res’ images for all of Switzerland way before Google did. It appears that when Google set up a new European HQ in Zurich, they didn’t want to be out-done, so they acquired the company, and integrated their images into the ones that Google already had for Switzerland (see this post on englishforum.ch). Unfortunately, the images are quite old (probably late 1990’s), and are not as high-res as the regular Google high-res, but it beats what they had before by a long shot.
Not just Guru Meditation, I was informed by the system that it was an error talking to backend. Friday afternoon philosophy of the highest water…
Gary – from what I can discover on the net in the light of your claim, it seems that you are at least partially correct.
MSN Encarta lists the following dams in the top 3 spots:
While Wikipedia’s page on the Nurek Dam states that:
Which means that if Wikipedia are right, and the Rogun dam is still incomplete, that currently the tallest dam in the world is actually the Nurek.
I will check my copy of the Guinness book when I get home tonight, and update the post accordingly! Thanks.
From Guinness World Records 2008!
The Nurek dam, on the river Vakhsh, Tajikistan, is 300 m (984) high and was completed in 1980.
It also says that the Rogunskaya dam would have been the tallest in world, had it been completed. But it wasn’t due to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Alex I just went to Wikipedia and entered dam. went to the bottom of the entry and there is a link to the tallest dams. Thats where I got the info.
Nothing wrong with the colour of the water. here’s a photo I took last summer on Lake Brienz (View Placemark (46.7113,7.96114)). It’s the fine limestone mud washed down by the glacial melt waters that does it,
Also the dam we see wasn’t completed until 1965. Completed in 1935 was the first dam seen when the water is low. Quotith wikipedia
The first Grande Dixence Dam was constructed between 1929 and 1935. A second dam that would flood the first was built between 1951 and 1965, and was filled on July 17, 1957. The first dam can still be seen when the water level is particularly low.
Here’s a photo showing the second and first dam during winter. http://www.swissdams.ch/Committee/history/images/2_Grande%20Dixence%20600.jpg
Great Picture!
Well if u put the view down to eye level the between the mountains and everything view looks freaking awesome. Im gonna look for a bigger dam though, I i find one, I will have a new post with it on.
yes the biggest dam is in paraguay.
25°24’30.71″S 54°35’29.82″W
There you go. Its about 63 miles long. No joke.