July 2008 Archives

According to Wikipedia "In 1971, while drilling for natural gas in Darvaza, Turkmenistan, the ground on which the drilling rig was placed collapsed, leaving a large gaping hole exposed with a diameter of around 60 meters. To avoid poisonous gases coming out of the hole, it was decided to let the gases burn. As of 2008, gases in the underground cavern are still burning without interruption. Locals have named the cavern The Door to Hell."

We've seen other reports saying it was from Soviet drilling in the 1950's. Either way someone decided to burn it and it's been burning for a long time.

Accidents like this exist all around the world but none with such beauty. Others, like the 2006 gas/mud slide in East Java, Indonesia which I actually visited myself, have caused much more damage and killed many people.

You can actually visit this today as part of a tour. But don't expect a hotel it's camels and camping all the way.

Here's some videos of the crater.




You can even see this on satellite photos. Although this time it looks like Yahoo! maps has the best verison.


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Definetly going to have to add this to our list of places to visit. If you want to learn more about Turkmenistan then visit the CIA factbook or Wikipedia.

Source: 1, 2, 3
Photos by John H Bradley

When the world was at war there was only really one safe place and that was underground. That's why the world today is littered with underground military bases many of which are still secret today. Many though have been declassified and some even open to the public. Sweden's Muskö (Musköanläggningen) Naval Base is one that looks right out of a Hollywood film.

"It´s not just the docks that are underground, the whole naval base is built under a mountain. There are repair factories, hospitals, dining rooms, barracks etc, all under the mountain. Thousands of soldiers would serve there in wartime and the hospital alone has over 1000 beds. As a comparison, when building the famous underground facilities in Cheyenne Mountains they had to remove 350.000 m3 of stone, in Muskö they had to blow away 1.500.000 m3 of stone (even more if you counting the underground road that leads to Muskö under the seabed)."

Source This reminds us of a secret lair for a super villain. No underground facility would be complete without huge blast doors. And how to you get around such a large complex? On a bike of course. Standard issue Swedish Military pushbikes of course. Here's a shot of the facilities supplies area. It looks like a shopping mall. You can view the location of the base on Google Maps below.


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But if you really want to zoom in and see some details you'll need to use Sweden's Hitta.se which has much more detailed imagery. Check the difference here. The site was actually sold to Kockums in 2007 for the purpose of marine maintenance. All 65 staff kept their jobs. Kockums is the developer of the very silly, but very stealthy, Visby Class Corvette.

More info on Muskö here, here and here. Supply store photo from from here.

Located 20 meters (65 ft) underground, the 1,480 square meter (16,000 sq ft) space contains emergency supplies to be distributed to the public in the event of a major earthquake. Items include 5,000 blankets, 8,000 rugs, 4,000 candles, 300 cooking pots, 200 t-shirts, and emergency medical supplies. A conveyor belt system is installed to help transport the supplies up to street level.

The underground warehouse is connected to an unnamed station on the Oedo line, Tokyo’s deepest subway. Apparently, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government maintains more than one of these warehouses, but the locations are kept secret. Which makes sense as 5,000 blankets isn't much help for a city of just under 13 million people.



This might confirm some of the conspiracy theories floating around.

We wonder if this is normal for most major cities or if they are just paranoid about the next Godzilla attack. Either way it makes a story like City of Ember seem real.

Via Pinktentacle

How to you drill a hole through a mountain? With a Tunnel Boring Machine, TBM for short, of course. These machines have been around since the 1850's although it was until the 1950s that the technology actually resembled what is used today.

Their size varies but the world's largest is 15.43 meter (50.62 ft) in diameter and currently working it's way through the ground under the Shanghai Yangtze River in China.

But rather than take you through all the technical and historical facts about TBM's. We'd rather just show some amazing photos. If you want to learn more about TBM's( and who doesn't) check the Wikipedia entry and if you're just into tunnels then check the list of world's longest tunnels. Make note to never get into a conversation about this with the Swiss. They love a good tunnel like the Gotthard Base Tunnel which has 2,000 people working 24hrs a day 365 days a year to create a 57 km (35 miles) long tunnel at some 2,000 meters underground. The BBC have a great article here on the project.

Oh and you'd think that the softer the rock the quicker you can drill. Not so.

"With this machine, in good conditions, we can excavate 40 metres in a day," says Mr Schmid. "That's an absolute record. However in poor rock conditions, where the rock is very soft, we can only excavate around half a metre a day," says Mr Schmid. "So in these situations, the work is delayed, and the costs rise."

Anyway as we said let's show some pictures.
Tell me that doesn't look like a Giger piece. Yep you guessed it. The Japanese had to top everyone and do a double tunnel TBM. This is what happens when a TBM get's the Flu. Old school!

Here are the few videos I could find featiring TBM's. Filming the action is usually reserved for the money shot. ie the final stage when the TBM breaches the other side.



People seem to love a tunnel opening.

And if you're wondering how you actually operate one of these machines check out the very boring controls.

Photo sources: 1, 2 Getty also has a collection of great TBM photos but we'd get in trouble if we used them.

Between the years 1945 and 1992 the United States government conducted 1,030 nuclear tests. 210 were classified as atmospheric tests, 815 were detonated underground, and 5 were exploded underwater. 804 underground tests were detonated at the Nevada Test Site (NTS).

The image above is from a test called "Baneberry" which had a yield of ten kilotons (a kiloton is the equivalent of 1,000 tons of TNT). The nuclear bomb was buried about 900 feet beneath the surface of Yucca Flat near the northern boundary of the NTS. The radiation release or venting resulted in a cloud of radioactive dust that reached an altitude of 10,000 feet. Following the Baneberry venting, new containment procedures were adopted to prevent similar occurrences.

If you're wondering why the test's all have weird names. Check this article here and show off at the next dinner party with your useless knowledge.

There are few things that are universally renowed as cool. Explosions are one of those things. While Hollywood loves a good explosion so do scientists and the military. We present here a collection of underground explosions for your viewing pleasure.

If you're interested in the more educational element to all this check the Wikipedia entry on Underground Nuclear Testing and read up. For us we'll just watch the pretty videos.

The following are the result of massive underground explosions by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission during Operation Dugout in 1960. Found on Archive.org.








You can actually see the craters on Google Maps. The map below lists most of the major tests done including the one called "Sedan" featured in the video above.


We liked the Nevada Test site map so much we created wallpapers for it. Get them at Earthwallpapers.org.

Here's a few tourist shots from Nevada. Golf sucks here we're told :)

Did you know blowing stuff up with nuclear bombs is for peaceful reasons? With a name like Operation Plowshare. how can it not be?



Not convinced? Let this video ease your doubts.



Here's a montage of hydrogen bomb tests. Check how the earth flows like water in the final shot. Source Archive.org.



Here's another random video which looks to be a combination of a few tests.



This final video isn't underground but underwater and if it wasn't so damn cool we'd leave it out.



The US Department of Energy's website has a great gallery of explosions both topside and underground. They sure knew how to blow things up in the 60's. Check out the full Nevada DOE site for soem interesting history and photos.

If you ever get the chance to buy cheap land in Nevada just make sure there wasn't any testing conducted in the 1960's first.

The Wieliczka Salt Mine, located in the town of Wieliczka, is within Poland's Kraków metropolitan area. It had been until 2007 in continuous operation, producing table salt, since the 13th century. Active mining was discontinued in 1996 due to low salt prices and mine flooding. The mine remains a major tourist attraction which attracts around 1.2 million people to the mine each year. You can see why, the place looks like a Quake level or a Bond villan's secret lair and almost every chamber is a fantastic photo opportunity.

Here are some VR images from the mine's official site Virtual tour.





The Wieliczka salt mine features a 3.5-km. tour for visitors (less than 1% of the length of the mine's passages) that includes statues of historic and mythic figures. The older works were sculpted by miners out of rock salt; more recent figures have been fashioned by contemporary artists. Even the crystals of the chandeliers are made from rock salt that has been dissolved and reconstituted to achieve a clear, glass-like appearance. The rock salt is naturally grey, in various shades like granite, so that the carvings resemble carved unpolished granite rather than having the white or crystalline appearance that many visitors expect.

From above is looks quite unassuming.

But as you can see from the map below there are many rooms and even a resturant to visit.
This is the first place we have featured that has World Heritage listing which it gained in 1978. You can browse a full world map of all WHC listed places here.

As a rough price guide it's around $30 USD per person for entry.

Also if you're suffering from respiratory tract conditions you can visit the Rehabilitation centre. We just hope your health insurance covers this place :)

While it looks like the set of a Mark Romanek filmclip, it's actually Super-Kamiokande of Super-K for short, a neutrino observatory in the city of Hida, Gifu Prefecture, Japan. The observatory was designed to search for proton decay, study solar and atmospheric neutrinos, and keep watch for supernovas in the Milky Way Galaxy.

Here's the image above with the scale set so you can see the person inside. This facility is massive. This is one workplace where you don't want to be last to leave for the day. If you need any proof that real life is stranger than fiction then this place is it. Super-K is run by The Institude for Cosmic Ray Research (ICRR) which sounds like a place from a Fantastic Four storyline. It's good to see that no matter how hi-tech it gets things are still done with standard office chairs.

Even after reading the Wikipedia entry and browsing the official site we're still not sure what it actually does. But that doesn't stop us from admiring the work that has gone into building such an amazing place. There is a 20 minute video explaining what it does but it's only available in Japanese.

This page here for the Sadbury Sno Neutrino detector explains it's purpose little better. The Super-K is located 1,000 m (3,281 ft) underground in Kamioka Mining and Smelting Co.'s Mozumi Mine in Hida's Kamioka area. It consists of a cylindrical stainless steel tank that is 41.4 m (135.8 ft) tall and 39.3 m (128.9 ft) in diameter holding 50,000 tons of ultra-pure water. Mounted on the superstructure are 11,146 photomultiplier tubes (PMT) 20 in (50.8 cm) in diameter.
That's a lot of ultrapure water which it's self is a hassle to distill down to that grade.

The reason the detector needs to be so deep underground is to block any neutrino's from the sun interfering with the experiments. Super-K is set to detect neutrino events. These are then recorded via the 11,000 PMT's and fed into a computer resulting in a huge amount of data for the scientists to sort through. When visalised through a computer they create quite stunning pieces of art. These would look great as an animated screensaver.

We've taken a few from this extensive gallery. You'll need a PHD, be be friends with Stephen Hawking, to actually understand what any of the pretty colours mean. There is an extensive photo gallery of the facility and it's construction available here.

While we've featured the Super-K there are currently 6 other Neutrino detectors operating around the world including Canada and the USA with another 6 currently in construction. Building these Neutrino detectors is big business. The only question we want to know is can you swim in it when it's filled with water?

A smaller but just as interesting Neutrino detector is the Sadbury Sno located in Ontario, Canada. I'm guessing the designer was a huge Star Wars fan :) Check out the very 80's readout screen. Sno has been decommisioned and is currently being upgraded to Sno+.

If you thought The Greenbrier bunker was impressive wait till you see what the UK kept hidden under a small town in the UK.

A 35 acre subterranean Cold War City that lies 100 feet beneath Corsham. Built in the late 50s this massive city complex was designed by Government personnel in the event of a nuclear strike. A former Bath stone quarry the city, code named Burlington, was to be the site of the main Emergency Government War Headquarters - the hub of the Country's alternative seat of power outside London.

Over a kilometre in length, and boasting over 60 miles of roads. Blast proof and completely self-sufficient the secret underground site could accommodate up to 6,000 people, in complete isolation from the outside world, for up to three months.

An underground lake and treatment plant could provide all the drinking water needed whilst 12 huge tanks could store the fuel required to keep the four massive generators, in the underground power station, running for up to three months. And unlike most urban cities, above ground, the air within the complex could also be kept at a constant humidity and heated to around 20 degrees. The city was also equipped with the second largest telephone exchange in Britain, a BBC studio from which the PM could address the nation and an internal Lamson Tube system that could relay messages, using compressed air, throughout the complex.

Below are some photos of the unused facilities. It was maintained in working order until the late 1980's until it was cut back to a staff of 4 and then decommisioned in December 2005.

Above is the BBC studio room. Above is the retro escalator to one of the main areas. The bunker featured an exact replica of the telephone exchange of it's time. The entire nations phone lines could have run through this system. Feels like City of Ember? The bunker boasts 60 miles of roads. Here's a map with the areas marked and it's relative size shown. It's big!

It wasn't until 2005 that it became unclassified as the UK Ministory of Defence put the area up for sale. Read full BBC article here.

The BBC has an extensive photo gallery, interactive map and video of the bunker.

This would have to be the closests to a real life City of Ember out there. It's spooky looking at the photos and to imagine that it was maintained up until the 1980's and has never once been used.

It also opens up the question of how many other bunkers like this are still classified and in operation?

For more info on this amazing cold war city check out this site and this article from The Guardian.

Ever wanted to compare the relative size of NYC subway system with that of Budapest? No... well if it ever arises in conversation you can use this handy site to brush up on your knowledge of the sizes of every major subway system in the world.