Satellite and mapping technologies like Google Maps have proven to be powerful tools for independent researchers and explorers around the world. While some important locations like military installations and private homes still remain off-limits, most parts of the planet are now free to explore for anyone with a computer and a few hours to kill.
Surprisingly, this has raised more questions than answers, as we can now see everything we don’t know about Earth from a bird’s eye view and in full HD. Thanks to the development of easily accessible services such as Google Maps and Google Earth, we now know about many more mysterious and unexplained places around the world than before.
10. Surtsey Island
Surtsey is a volcanic island located off the southern coast of Iceland. It was formed by a volcanic eruption in 1963, making it one of the youngest islands in the world. The eruption lasted for about three and a half years , and by the time it ended, the island had grown to an area of about 2.7 square kilometers or 1.04 square miles.
Because of its age and isolation, Surtsey offers scientists a rare opportunity to study the formation of an entirely new ecosystem in real time. Access to the island is therefore strictly controlled and is currently only open for research. scientists .
There is still much we do not know about the topography and ecology of Surtsey. It may even be one of the last unexplored places on Earth, as many of the species found here are thought to be unique to the island.
9. Kazakh geoglyphs
In 2007, researchers using Google Earth stumbled upon a bunch of massive symbols somewhere in the steppes of northern Kazakhstan. These huge patterns, which can only be seen and appreciated from above, include images of animals, geometric shapes, and other mysterious symbols that we have yet to decipher.
They are mainly made of earth embankments , the exact purpose and meaning of these glyphs is still a mystery. Some believe that they may have been used for religious or ceremonial purposes, while others think that they are some kind of navigational markers. Their age is also unknown: estimates range from a few hundred to over 8,000 years old. We don’t know whether they were built by a lost civilization or just a very dedicated group of hunter-gatherers, which defies everything we know. presentation about what people were capable of long ago.
8. Azraq Oasis
The wheel-shaped stone structures at Azraq Oasis in Jordan, first described by RAF Flight Lieutenant Percy Maitland in 1927, remain a mystery. Although we don't know about all of them, two have since been discovered to be at least 8500 years. The nomadic Bedouin tribes in the region call them "Old Men's Works," which includes other similar works scattered across Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
So far, we know little about these structures, other than the fact that the stone material used to build them was brought from far away, requiring some kind of coordinated effort on a large scale. One study suggests that they were used for astronomy, as the spokes of some of the wheels are aligned in a southeast-northwest direction. However, this is only a guess, as the wheel alignment is not common to all wheels in set .
7. Naval base in the shape of a swastika
Sometime in 2007, internet users fiddling with Google Earth noticed something rather interesting about the Coronado Naval Air Station in Southern California. While from the ground it looked like a normal building with a few L-shaped sections, from the air the building was clearly shaped like a Nazi swastika.
Although the military agreed that it looked bad and promised to fix it, there are no reports that it has been fixed. As you might expect, the discovery has sparked a number of conspiracy theories online, such as that German prisoners of war from World War II secretly built it as a tribute to Adolf Hitler. Another theory is that the base resembles a set of Calvary crosses and points to Jerusalem .
While it is unlikely that any of these outlandish theories are actually true, some records suggest that the Navy knew about the swastika before the building was completed. In reality, this may have been an oversight by individual building designers rather than some grand Nazi plot in the United States.
6. Phantom Island
On September 15, 1774, British explorer Captain James Cook and his crew spotted an island off the coast of Australia, which they promptly named Sandy Island and added to their maps. The island has appeared on every other map for centuries since, marked as a small piece of land located between Australia and New Caledonia.
However V November 2012 a group of Australian scientists on a research expedition tried to visit it, but found that the land did not exist. Up until that point, it was even marked on Google Maps, but later that year, it was removed. Now, you can see a visible rise in the seabed where the island should be, which has caused all sorts of controversy around it. Although it is possible that the island does not exist and there is actually nothing in that place, Sandy Island has been the center of conspiracies and other alternative theories ever since the story first came to light.
5. Mount Liko
Mount Lico is a remote, isolated mountain in northern Mozambique. Although it has always been known to locals, it was not until 2012 that it gained international recognition when a scientist — Dr. Julian Bayliss — discovered a whole tropical forest on its summit using Google Earth. He assembled a team of 28 engineers, biologists, climbers and other experts in their fields and decided to go check it out himself.
What Bayliss found is now recognized as one of the last truly unexplored places on Earth. The summit of Mount Liko is home to a brand new tropical rainforest that has never been disturbed by outside interference. They found a new species of butterfly, a bunch of small mammals and reptiles, and an unknown species of amphibian that they had never seen before, and they were just beginning to explore the place. Mysteriously, the team also discovered several inverted pots near a stream, which may indicate human presence in the area before the team's first expedition.
4. Jeanette Island
Somewhere in 2018 Internet users have discovered that Jeanette Island, a remote Russian island in the East Siberian Sea, has turned into black dot on Google Maps. He was named in honor of USS Jeannette — an American ship that became stranded there in 1881. The crew tried to find the legendary polar route to open Arctic waters, but to no avail. They claimed the territory on behalf of the American government and decided to get out as soon as they could, because it was still a remote, icy island in the middle of nowhere.
Since then, it has been unclear whether the island belongs to the US or Russia, with both countries laying more claim to it than others. While this may be the reason why it disappeared from Google Maps, the internet, as usual, is full of alternative theories about it, including aliens and secret military bases.
3. Mururoa Island
Mururoa is a small island in French Polynesia, located in the South Pacific Ocean. In the period from From 1966 to 1996, France used it extensively as a nuclear testing site, conducting over 193 tests during that period. These tests and the subsequent contamination of the local environment on the island have been controversial ever since, and we still don't have a clear idea of the extent of the damage.
The nuclear program was stopped in 1996 due to international and local pressure, and since then the island of Mururoa has remained virtually uninhabited and closed to visitors. Part of it is now completely washed away Google Maps , probably to hide its bombed-out topography and other details about the tests from prying eyes. It is also, for some reason, guarded by the French military , which only adds to the mystery.
2. Random Forms in the Gobi Desert
History of the mysterious megastructures in China's Gobi Desert was first reported by Gizmodo in 2011. Since then, readers and other internet users have discovered more of these mysterious structures, often shaped like neat geometric shapes like squares and circles. Aside from being located in the middle of nowhere, they don't seem to serve any obvious purpose at all, even though someone clearly spent a lot of time creating them.
Some people speculate that they are ancient ruins once used for navigation, perhaps dating back to the Silk Road era. Others say they are part of a secret Chinese military facility or even a secret base for classified research. One theory is that they are simply runways or roads built for industrial purposes in the remote desert, even if one of the structures is brightly blue colors for no apparent reason.
1. Nazca Lines
The Nazca Lines are a series of ancient geoglyphs located in Nazca desert in southern Peru. They were discovered in the 1920s, when commercial airlines began flying over the region and pilots first reported strange markings on the ground. The lines, which include images of animals, people, and various geometric shapes, are so large that they can only be fully appreciated from the air.
As you can tell from the overall theme of this list, we still don’t know who made them or why. Theories say they were used for astronomical observations, religious rituals, or some kind of ancient communication, though there’s no evidence to support or refute any of these. The lines remain one of the most mysterious ancient structures we’ve ever discovered, comprising over 800 straight lines, 300 different geometric shapes, and 70 animal and plant motifs, including 168 geoglyphs that were only discovered in December 2022. years .
Оставить Комментарий