I'm pretty confident this place will blow you away. The "Door to Hell" is a burning entrance to a chasm in the desert in Turkenistan, near Derweze (commonly referred to as 'Darvaza'). Due to its remoteness, there isn't a lot of information on it online, but I've done my best to collate what I can!
I'll kick it off with some amazing pictures. We'll see later from the satellite images (taken in daylight, suprisingly) that the glow of the hole on these photos is considerably enhanced by the fact they're taken at dusk, but it's still an amazing sight:
I think you get the idea now - pretty cool, huh? For a bit more explaination and as I have no personal knowledge, here's a quote from Joshua Kucera who blogged on the same topic:
"It's 60 meters in diameter and was apparently created sometime in the 50s when the Soviets were prospecting for natural gas in this area. That’s all the guidebook says, and when we got there I asked my guide for a more complete explanation. So, how exactly was this made, I asked. "It was natural", was the answer"
I've heard this "accident" was supposedly some prospectors who were checking the area for signs of natural gas when the ground collapsed into a large underground chasm (presumably costing some human life in the process). Gas started leaking form this newly aerated chasm and to stop a major gas leak, the (remaining) prospectors lit the leaking gas to allow it to burn away safely. Of course, it would have to have been burning for decades now, but who knows? It looks like a large hole!
The image below shows a couple of map views of the "Door to Hell", showing a hole (I think it's visible anyway!) in the middle of the desert. The Google Maps image appears to show the whole glowing an orange colour (photos taken at dusk / dawn?) whilst the Yahoo images show blue deposits around the hole. I did a bit of digging as to what these deposits could be, but it's much more likely that the image correction process has slightly misrepresented the colours in this case. Click on the image to be taken to a site giving a variety of map choices for the location:
So there we go - A bit of information on a slightly crazy phenomena, but the photos are worth it on their own!
The Starfire Optical Range (SOR) is a US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Its main duty is to "develop and demonstrate optical wavefront control technologies". Due to the fact it is classified a secure lab facility, there isn't a great deal of information about its operation, although it is commonly reported to be looking into the feasibility of using ground-based laser as an anti-satellite weapon.
There aren't a great number of photos of the facility but what are out there are pretty impressive. Have a look at the photos below; references to various sites offering more information can be found underneath these:
The last image is a view of the underside of the Columbia space shuttle during its entry from mission STS-107 on Feb. 1, 2003, as it passed by the Starfire Optical Range. This image was received by NASA as part of the Columbia accident investigation and is being analyzed.
This is the second issue of a series on this blog highlighting earth stories from The Observer newspaper. Each of these stories offers an interesting perspective on Earth Sciences and were so good I felt the need to serialise them!
Every day I get up at 5am and walk up from the fringes of town to the market. There I buy dynamite and coca leaves and head to the entrance of the mine to meet the other members of my cooperacion. We don boiler suits and helmets with torches fixed on - the helmets are pretty flimsy, from the Nineties - and we then walk and crawl deep into Cerro Rico (or Rich Mountain). I come out 12 hours later. No food, just a few 20-minute stops for rest - we chew the coca leaves all day and they stop us feeling hungry and give us energy to work.
My immediate family has been mining in Cerro Rico, Bolivia for seven generations; my people have been mining here for 20 generations. We were living at the top of the world in the high Andes when the Spanish came in the 16th century. They realised that our mountain was full of silver, and they set us to work on the mountain. We have a museum in town that tells the story; there are coins from the 16th century. These coins were taken by ship from Venezuela back to Europe. Pirates hung around the Caribbean in order to nab the silver from the ships. The ships that made it delivered their silver to the king of Spain. Back in those days Potosi was one of the four biggest, wealthiest cities in the world, along with Seville, London and Paris. But the wealth didn't come to us.
At first my ancestors were paid a pittance, but then the Spaniards changed the system and used forced labour. We think 8 million Aymara and Quechua Indians have died in Cerro Rico in the last 500 years. We call the entrance the 'mouth of hell'. These days we enter in teams and work the mine privately. We use picks, dynamite and metal trucks on wheels to remove the ore. It's pretty tough work, good exercise, and I sleep very well at night. We get a payment from private companies depending on how many trucks of ore we can remove. Much of the silver has gone, so we mine other things as well: iron, zinc, tin, lead, cadmium and chromium. The ore is smelted in factories outside.
Most miners don't work for more than 20 years - they're dead by then. I've been lucky, going for 26 years, since I was 12. The most dangerous time is when we're blasting. After so much digging, the mountain is like a sponge. Sometimes the roof falls in and traps us, or even kills someone; sometimes pockets of poisonous gas are released. Several of my friends have died form this poisoning - I collapsed once from it and had to be dragged out by a friend. You make good friends when you work in the mine.
About 50 of us die every year. Sometimes we blast open the vein we're working on into a vein which other miners are working on. If we don't quickly agree on what's top happen, we will often start fighting the rival team to see who is going to get to carry on working there. Yes, people have died in these fights. The other big danger is silicosis. We don't have breathing equipment, so we inhale rock dust the whole time. Most miners have breathing problems. I have 40% silicosis. I only get a government pension when I get to 80% - I won't have much need for it then though.
After work, we drink El Puro (a 96% proof alcohol drink) and laugh and joke together before heading home for our daily meal. I hate the mine in a way, but it's the only place I can work. My son takes tourists round the mine, which is much better because he only spends five hours a day in it - much safer. I hope his son gets educated and finds a job in a building and not in the mine. It feeds us, but it's also eaten enough of my family already. I can see Cerro Rico all the time I'm not in it. It's a pink cone visible from all over town.
Miguel Rodriguez is 38 and works in the silver mines of Potosí in Bolivia.
I thought it was about time for a new mini-project so I got to work on an easy-to-use quiz applet. The idea was to set a quiz out on one page, but use JavaScript to bring each question in one at-a-time, rolling in and replacing the previous. The JavaScript / Ajax would carry and process the form data, bringing the result back at the end of the questions.
JQuery handled the form data and a separate JS file was used to animated the text movement. What results should be a nice and easy-to-use quiz, but see for yourself by playing along below:
It can't be too hard when it's multiple choice - see if you can be crowned a quiz expert! I'll hopefully adapt this idea a bit when I have time, would be nice to have a results breakdown at the end (and the answers!) so that would be the next step...
Google Maps recently released the functionality to make PolyLines follow the shortest path across the globe, rather than a straight line across the map projection. This will follow a curve showing the shortest distance between any points and will equate to roughly the route a plane would take to get between two points.
To see what I mean, here is an example. Move the two points to see the quickest route and also the route distance:
You might be wondering how to do that and it's really quite simple. You need to set up two points and have set up a PolyLine between them and then it's just a case setting the line to geodesic:true and you're in business:
marker1 = new GMarker(52.166,0.966,{draggable: true, icon:iconStart}); marker2 = new GMarker(37.4328, -122.077,{draggable: true, icon:iconDest}); poly = new GPolyline(line,"#843718", 3, 40, {geodesic:true}) map.addOverlay(poly);
Another nice feature and pretty simple to implement :)
I think I've posted about the Strange Maps blog before, so I just revisited it and thought I'd link to a couple of recent stories.
Firstly, there's the great story of a made-up island, used as an April Fools hoax by The Guardian newspaper. The headline is worthy of an award, but I'm not sure if that's of the blog's creation or The Guardian's!
The second story is of an old-fashioned 'GPS' system, only really of use in an age of few roads, or the amount of scrolls would become rather epic! Still, a great-looking solution to a problem and one I'm pretty fond of.
I like learning new things to do on Photoshop and there are loads of great tutorials out there. My favourite site is Tutorial9 and I've posted the results of one of their tutorials before (Article #48: Apple Artwork & Dust). This time, I thought I'd try a text effect...and I'm pretty pleased with the result [click to enlarge].
It was nice and easy to follow and as always, they provide a PSD file in case you get stuck - click the links below if you fancy trying it yourself.
