The history of bridges started in ancient times – dating back to Mesopotamia. In the beginning, they were incredibly simple structures built using natural resources like wooden logs, stone
Category Archives: Places
The Costs of Replicating Ancient Architectural Wonders Today
In “Original Copies“, Bianca Bosker looks at a current trend in China to recreate some of human’s civilization greatest architectural achievements. Various elite suburbs in the country feature a variety of world wonders, from a 108-foot copy of the Eiffel Tower to picturesque Venetian scenescapes.
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Albert Square, Manchester – a Historical Painting and a Contemporary Photo
Two images, two different times, almost the same composition: Albert Square – a public square in the center of Manchester, England; on the left, as depicted in a 1910 oil painting by the French impressionist painter Adolphe Valette (13 October 1876 – 1942). The Albert Memorial (left) and Gladstone statue (right) can be seen in the foreground. On the right a photo of the same spot in 2018. In the contemporary photo, there’s a taxi iğnstead of the horse cart in the old painting. And in both images, a man pushing a handcart at the exact same spot. Beautiful.
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Hồ Thuỷ Tiên, an abandoned water park in Vietnam
Hồ Thuỷ Tiên is an abandoned water park in Vietnam. It was built in 2004 in an edge of the Vietnamese city of Huế, to the tune of approximately $3 million dollars. The idea was to create a family water park with amusement rides, slides, pools, shows, and an aquarium. But when the park opened its gates to the public, it was only partially completed.
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Mont Saint-Michel, France, From Space
The European Space Agency (ESA) occasionally posts high-resolution photos of space under the title of “week in images”. This amazing image of the Mont Saint-Michel from space, which was captured on 21 June 2017, is also featured on the ESA’s Earth from Space video programme, presented by Kelsea Brennan-Wessels from the ESA Web TV virtual studios.
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Watch: Iceland Is Growing New Forests for the First Time in 1,000 Years
Iceland was extensively forested when it was first settled. When the Vikings first arrived in the 9th century, the Nordic island was covered in 25 to 40 percent forest, compared to 1% in the present day. In the late 12th century, Ari the Wise (Ari Thorgilsson, 1067–1148 AD), Iceland’s most prominent medieval chronicler, described it in the Íslendingabók (Book of IcelandersNotes 1) as “forested from mountain to sea shore”. Unfortunately, after the permanent human settlement, the forests were heavily exploited for firewood, timber and to make room for farming. Within a few centuries, almost all of Iceland’s trees were gone. This rapid deforestation has resulted in massive soil erosion that puts the island at risk for desertification. Today, many farms have been abandoned. Three-quarters of Iceland’s 100,000 km2is affected by soil erosion, 18,000 km2 (6,900 sq mi) serious enough to make the land useless.
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Earth’s Wonders Like You Have Never Seen Them Before
Planet.com, a team of analysts and rocket scientists, software engineers and creatives, environmentalists and researchers, have published an amazing post on their Medium account, @planetlabs. In the post titled “Earth’s Wonders Like You’ve Never Seen Them Before”, you can see amazing aerial photos of some famous places.
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Most Remote Places on Earth
How far away can you get from everybody else on Earth? A video, published by RealLifeLore channel on YouTube answers this very question. The answer is “actually quite far”, there are a lot of extremely remote places left in the world and some of them have actually yet to be reached by anybody in all of history. The world is an enormous place. Here are the most remote places on Earth.
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Watch: Astronaut Shares Photos of Places He’d Visited on Earth Alongside Photos of the Same Locations he Snapped from Space
NASA astronaut Randy “Komrade” Bresnik, the commander of the Expedition 53 (the 53rd expedition to the International Space Station) has published a beautiful video on his twitter account titled “Through the eyes of a spaceman: One World Many Views”. In the video, Bresnik shared photos of places he’d visited on Earth alongside photos of the same locations he snapped from space. He also wrote: “You don’t have to be in outer space to experience the beauty of our home planet. Capture the beauty of a moment, or the excitement of an instant, and share it with others.”
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Watch: The Man Who Flies With Migrating Birds
Using a two-seater ultralight aircraft built by himself, Frenchman Christian Moullec flies with migrating birds since 1995. In that year, dubbed the “birdman”, Moullec, saw that lesser white-fronted geese were struggling with their migration from Germany to Sweden. Inspired by the work of the famous Austrian ethologist Konrad LorenzNotes 1, known as “the man who walked with geese”, he decided to help them and built his handmade aircraft. Today, if the weather permits, he flies with birds almost every day and guides them through their journey. This stunning footage published by National Geographic shows Moullec, “the man who flies with migrating birds” guiding the flocks of vulnerable species in his ultralight and taking enthralled passengers with him. According to National Geographic, he takes tourists up to fly with birds from March through October.
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