Cool exterior elevators

Cool exterior elevators:
The Bailong Elevator is the world’s largest exterior elevator built onto the side of a huge cliff in Zhangjiajie in China. At over 330 meters tall, this elevator looms high midway up a cliff overlooking a valley far below. Moreover, the elevator is mostly glass, affording passengers a dizzying view to the depths below:





The Hammetschwand Lift is the highest exterior elevator of Europe and is located in Switzerland. It brings you 156 meters in the air from a spectacular rock path to the lookout point Hammetschwand on the Bürgenstock plateau overlooking Lake Lucerne:








These kind of exterior lift are sometimes also integrated in buildings like here in the Lacerda building in the city of Salvador in Brazil:





This thing takes you up 72 meters, and at the top you have a great view over the nearby bay.

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Largest cooling towers

Largest cooling towers:
Cooling towers are heat removal devices used to transfer process waste heat to the atmosphere. These cooling towers are found at really big dimensions at most power plants. The primary use of large, industrial cooling towers is to remove the heat absorbed in the circulating cooling water systems used in power plants. These things have to be so big to be able to cool the water in a constant rate. If these things are not used you need an enormeous amount of cooling canals which for example can be seen at the Turkey point power plant in Florida.

The world's tallest cooling tower is the 200 meter tall cooling tower of Niederaussem Power Station in Germany. The skyline of the villages nearby are all dominated by this thing:

The cooling towers of the Belleville nuclear power plant in Billeville sur Loire in France are also giants. These cooling towers are 150 meters in diameter at the base, and are about 170 meters high:


These things were climbed by Greenpeace activists in 2007 as you can see in the pictures below. This way you can easily estimate how big these structures are:




Even the open structure at the base is taller then you would think:


Other huge cooling towers can be seen (not yet visible in google maps) at the new expansion of the Neurath Power station in Germany which was recently completed. The 2 cooling towers here are each 170 meters tall:




The cooling towers during construction:

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The "elephant cages"

The "elephant cages":

Elephant cages are what they called or in normal terms the Wullenwebers or the FLR-9 antennas (the original name introduced by Dr. Hans Rindfleisch was Wullenwever). I talk about the circularly disposed antenna arrays built by the United States during the 1960s. These are large circular antenna arrays used by the military to triangulate radio signals for radio navigation, intelligence gathering and search and rescues. Because of the immense sizes (370 meters in diameter and 40 meters high) and huge circular reflecting screens, the antennas are colloquially known as the elephant cages. In total there are 8 of these huge FLR-9 antennas build, spread over the world. They were constructed at:

-Augsburg, Germany. This one is not in use anymore:

-Chicksands, United Kingdom ( not in use anymore):

-Clark AFB, Philippines. As you can see in the picture below this elephant cage has been converted to a 35,000-seat fabric-covered amphitheatre:

-Elmendorf AFB, Alaska. This one is still operational:

- Karamursel, Turkey. This one is already overgrown by vegetation and is the least visible one. It looked identical as the other ones.

- Misawa, Japan. This antenna is still active also:

-Ramasun, Thailand (This one is not visible in google maps in highress).

-San Vito dei Normanni, Italy:

As you can see in the pictures above all of these antennas excist of two major rings of HF antennaes. The outer ring is for monitoring shorter HF wavelengths and is is about 370 meters in diameter and contains some 120 sleeve monopoles. The inner ring is for monitoring Longer wavelength signals, and is typically some 100 meters in diameter with some containing 40 folded dipoles. A horizontal ground screen about 400 meters in diameter surrounds the entire site. The station's intercept operators work in an operations building in the center of the array.

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Cutler's VLF transmitters.

The VLF Transmitter Cutler:
The VLF Transmitter Cutler is the United States Navy's very low frequency (VLF) station at Cutler, in Maine. The station provides one-way communication to the United States submarine forces. These VLF transmitters can reach submarines 40 meter under the water. Most of the time the submarines itself are further underwater but they use an antenna floating 40 meter under the sea level which is attached to the submarine. This VLF transmitter is the second largest radio transmitter on the planet. It has a transmission power of 1800 kW, making it to one of the most powerful VLF-transmitters in the world. It also is one of the world's largest consumers of electrical power. In the picture below you can see the huge antenna's:

The extensive antenna system consists of two completely separate arrays. Each array consists of six diamond shaped panels supported by 13 towers. The central tower of each antenna system is 304 m tall, which is almost as tall as the Eiffel tower. It is surrounded by six 266.7 m tall masts, placed on a ring with a radius of 556 m around the central tower. The remaining six towers of the array are 243.5 m tall and placed on a circle of 935.7 m around the central tower:

It is proven that people in the surrounding area of the antenna's have a higher chance of getting cancer. This is why a lot of people left the nearby town of Cutler. The people of the house seen in the picture below would for sure be in the danger zone:

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The Troll A platform

The Troll A platform:
The Troll A platform is a condeep offshore natural gas platform located ( not visible in google maps) in the Troll gas field 70 kilometers west of the city of Bergen in Norway. It is the tallest construction that has ever been moved to another position, relative to the surface of the Earth, and is among the largest and most complex engineering projects in history:


The Troll A platform has an overall height of 472 meters and weighs 656,000 tons. You may ask yourself how this thing can be 472 meters heigh as you look at the picture above. This is because the largest part of the giant structure is placed below sea level. The platform stands on the sea floor on 4 303 meters (994 feet) high concrete legs. In the pictures below you can see the structure when it was stilll above sea level and was being towed by tugs to it's final destination:





Here are some pictures of people standing at the bottom of such a concrete leg:

These people are standing more as 300 meters below sea level but the 1 meter concrete walls of the "legs"can handle this pressure. The structure was built by Norwegian Contractors for Norske Shell, and there are about 200-300 people working on this gas platform.

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Cool cable cars

Cool cable cars:
The cable car track towards the vacation island of Vinepearl near Nha Trang in Vietnam is the longest cable car to cross a sea in the world. It is 3310 meters long. The system excists of 9 pillars each with a height of about 55 meters measured from the orange foundation structures (seen in the pictures below) to the top. This foundation structure is 8 meters above sea level so you are basically hanging 63 meters above the sea:




From this ideal height, sitting in the cabinet, visitors can enjoy the panorama of pretty Nha Trang city embraced by meandering beaches and the paradise-like beauty of Nha Trang bay, one of the world’s most beautiful and famous bays:



The system can transport 1000-1500 people an hour in 60 cabins, each of which contains 8 people. A similair cable car is this one in Singapore. This thing brings people from the main land of Singapore towards the resort island of Santosa. The cable cars start at the harbour front tower:


They are hanging 85 meters above sea level offering a great view over the skyline and harbour of Singapore:


And what about the cable cars that are going to the Langkawi sky bridge on the island of Langkawi in Malaysia. This sky bridge is 800 meters above sea level:


To get there you first have to travel from the village to the middle station 700 meters up in the sky. You can see that station all the way up the mountain in the picture below:


And from there you have to go to the top station station where the sky bridge is located. If you are afraid of heights this is probably one the most stupid things you can do:

Probably the most scary cable car in the world is situated near the mountain of Aguille Di Midi in France. This thing is also officaly the heighest cable car in the world and is going to the summit of this mountain:



This thing is going ridiculously steep and brings you 2800 meters in the sky measuring from the start point in Chamonix to the end station ( seen in the pictures below):

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The Angkor barays

The Angkor reservoirs:
Angkor is an ancient city that served as the seat of the Khmer empire that flourished here from approximately the ninth century to the fifteenth century A.D. This was te largest pre industrial city in the world and it is still very good visble from satellite images. Nowadays only the temples and the contours of the city remain:

The temples of the Angkor area number over one thousand, ranging in scale from nondescript piles of brick to the magnificent Angkor Wat, said to be the world's largest single religious monument (seen in the picture below):

The remains of this city which are now the most prominent are especially the large barrays/ reservoirs on the west side and on the east side of the city.These barays have functioned as a vast holding tank for water that fed irrigation canals in dry times. Many later studies, however, theorize that the barays had mainly symbolic functions, serving as a vast earthly depiction of the Hindu Sea of Creation. No matter for what reason these barrays were created they are impressive for sure. The largest baray is the West Baray oriented east-west and located just west of the walled city Angkor Thom. It is Rectangular in shape and measuring approximately 8 by 2.1 kilometers:

Its waters were contained by tall earthen dikes. Today a part of this baray is still underwater. In the center of the baray is the West Mebon, a very small Hindu temple built on an artificial island.

The East baray is the second-largest baray in the Angkor region, measuring roughly 7,150 by 1,740 meters. The labor and organization necessary for its construction were staggering: Its dikes contain roughly 8 million cubic meters of fill. The East Baray today contains no water; farmers till crops on its bed. But its outlines remain clearly visible in satellite photographs:

In the middle of this baray is the East Mebon temple, located on elevated ground that was an island in the days when the baray contained water. There is also another large barray which is called the Preah Khan Baray which is 4 kilometers by 1 kilometer. This one also has a temple in the middle, which is called Neak Pean.

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Giant radio telescopes

Giant radio telescopes:
A radio telescope is a form of directional radio antenna used in radio astronomy and in tracking and collecting data from satellites and space probes. Radio telescopes are typically large parabolic ("dish") antenna used singularly or in an array formation. Radio observatories are located far from major centers of population in order to avoid electromagnetic interference (EMI) from radio, TV, radar, and other EMI emitting devices. When you are talking about a radio telescope observatory in an Array formation then the very large Array observatory (Check out the streetview also) in New Mexico in the U.S is the biggest in the world. In this place 27 independent antennas, each of which has a dish diameter of 25 meters and weighs 209 metric tonnes, are placed in an Y-shaped formation:

The largest individual radio telescope of any kind is the RATAN-600 located near Nizhny Arkhyz in Russia. It consists of a 576-meter circle of rectangular radio reflectors, each of which can be pointed towards a central conical receiver:

If you look at a single radio telescope the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico is the biggest in the world. This thing has a diameter of 305 meters and was also featured in the James Bond movie Goldeneye:

That thing floating in the air is the reciever. It is located on a 900-ton platform which is suspended 150 m in the air above the dish by 18 cables running from three reinforced concrete towers, one of which is 110m high and the other two of which are 80 m high (the tops of the three towers are at the same elevation). Another very big single radio telescope is the Goldstone radio telescope not far from Barstow in California in the U.S. This thing has a diametre of 70 metres:

And what about the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia in the U.S. It has a diameter of 100 meters and is the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope and the world's largest land-based movable structure:

Looking down from it:

The largest radio telescope in Europe is the 100-meter diameter antenna in Effelsberg, Germany:

This was also was the world's largest fully-steerable telecope for 30 years until the slightly larger Green Bank Telescope mentioned above was opened in West Virginia, United States, in 2000.

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