So i was looking at the area south of Beijing and saw… what looked like ant hills. For hundreds of miles into Shangdong and Henan provinces.
Ant hills everywhere!
Wow! Look at the rate of urbanization. Amazing!
You see these cities surrounded by farm lands… i mean, …
…wait, the bright colored spots around the cities are…
More cities…
Look at the China south-north water transfer project in Google Earth, its quite incredible.
There is a kml file here: https://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2016/07/chinas-south-north-water-transfer-project.html
Here is a youtube video.
There are some kind of structures in the desert near Basra along the Iranian border.
I’m guessing these are defensive berms left over from the Iran-Iraq War.
Since it hardly ever rains there, maybe they haven’t eroded away yet? Whatever this stuff is, it goes on and on for dozens of kilometers. An enormous amount of earth must have been moved.
I wonder if there’s a /r/googleearthporn to find other neat stuff like the above.
Almost certainly. Those look like artillery pits to me. Sandbags or some other mechanical stabilization seems likely, as far as why they’re still there.
6 guns is a typical artillery battery. The fire direction center probably is the small bunker at the 10 o’clock position.
The ground in southern Iraq / Kuwait / Northern Saudi Arabia is so hard (the constant wind blew any soil or sand away long ago) that it’s nearly impossible to dig down, so defensive structures are built up. Effective against crappy Iranian equipment and tactics, but accurate American weapons and mobility picked those things apart in '91.
Is this the westernmost portion of the Han Great Wall?
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1mXXBqJDqtSsXZtTv9Dq22g0Hw1QeN2z5
The scale of that Chinese engineering project really is amazing… thanks for that video.
