Geology rocks. Pun very much intended. Now that we've got that out of the way, let' move on to the hardcore things that make up the bedrock of what Bored Panda is all about - beautiful photos that are hot as lava. Please excuse my dad jokes.
A geologist named Will is known for collecting and uploading interesting things he finds on Google Earth. Some of them are very peculiar. Others are breathtakingly gorgeous. But one thing is for certain - all of them are worth seeing. Scroll through our list of Will's amazing discoveries on our beautiful Earth, upvote your favorites, and rock on. Let us know what you think of the geologist's earth views, and after you're done, look through Bored Panda's other list of amazing Google Earth finds.
"A fort in Lille, France. I love finding forts while exploring. Star forts are an easy to spot shape. I esp. like finding forts in the middle of cities."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"This is a private island on the coast of Maine. The bridge has a gate, and the house overlooks a shipping lane in Penobscot Bay. I'd spend all day watching boats, drinking wine, and telling the world to fuck off."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"It looks like an abstract painting. My first thought was a huge archeological excavation site. Turns out that was wrong. These pits are used in a very old fashioned salt extraction operation."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
Will goes by the user name geologistsmakethebedrock on Imgur, where he uploads most of his Earth map finds. The geologist from New Orleans told Bored Panda in an earlier interview a little bit about what he does: “I tried to find interesting examples of geologic processes to use in lecture presentations. That’s when I started gathering screenshots of cool stuff and beautiful landscapes for myself. Then I decided to share some images on Imgur because my wife was tired of me making her look at them and listen to my explanations."
"A very sinuous river. This is a good illustration of how oxbow lakes form. In the middle of the image you can see where a meander loop is being actively cut off."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"Here is a perfect meteor crater. It has a very nice raised rim. I bet if you mapped out the lake bed you would see a central peak too."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"One tip to find interesting geology things is to look for symmetry or patterns in landscapes. Most symmetry is from human activities, but certain geologic processes can create semi-symmetry," the geologist said.
The geologist also wrote on Imgur that he really likes to “peruse Google Earth looking for cool things. My captions either come from basic internet research or my guess about what's happening.”
"I couldn't find anything about this strange place. It's a huge, planned settlement near Namibe, Angola. It seems to have been constructed around 2013-2014. It also appears to be uninhabited due to no vehicles. Does anyone know anything about this place."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"This is Assamakka, Niger, a community that appears to be fighting a losing battle with the sands.It's easy to see the prevailing wind direction here."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
Most of us use Google Maps and Google Earth to find our way to where we need to go. Because nobody likes getting lost when they’re in a rush. But there will always be people like Will who see an opportunity to use something functional to find things of beauty.
Google Earth first appeared many years ago, way back in 2001; it’s not a kid anymore, because it turned 18 this summer. Yup, Google Earth can now legally vote and get married.
"I recently read the book, "Skeletons on the Zahara." It tells the true story of some US sailors who wrecked on the NW African coast in 1815. It sucked for them. I wanted to see if I could find a ship wreck. I figured a desert coast would preserve metal wrecks well. It didn't take to long to find this one in NW South Africa. It looks like a modern ship, and sure enough it wasn't there in 2003 (the oldest picture available)."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
What started as a simple project quickly grew in scope to provide ultra-detailed images of our planet. But that’s not all! Did you know that Google’s project to create 3D representations of Earth eventually grew into something spanning the cosmos? That’s right, there are such things as Google Moon and Google Mars. I mean, how amazing is that? We’re hoping that Will decides to look for awesome finds on the Moon and on Mars, too.
"This is some sort of reservoir in Belgium. I've never seen an octagonal pond before. I wonder why they made it that way."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"Atolls:
Hot spots not only punch holes in the crust, but the also raise it up and heat it. As the plate moves away, it cools and subsides. The mountains also subside, and also erode. If the mountains are formed in a tropical climate a reef will form around it's edges. If the coral growth can keep up with the relative sea level rise from the subsidence, then the reef will survive while the mountain sinks and eventually disappears below water level. If that happens you will get a circular ring of reef with an open lagoon in the center like the atoll above. At one point there was a volcano in the center of that lagoon. It's a cool example of biology and geology interacting and biology winning, so to speak."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"A volcano poking up out of the South Pacific. I'm not sure if this one is growing or eroding away. Seems like the rich people in boats are having a good time."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"While looking up that lava flow in New Mexico, there were some maps showing some nuclear bomb test sites nearby. This must have something to do with that. I'm fairly sure this is the sight of the first nuclear detonation."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"A glacier flowing out into a lake. The presence of a connecting stream suggests the 2 parts of the lake are at different levels. The glacier made an ice damn. That's pretty cool.
A river trying to do the same thing in another lake."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"The dark green lines caught my eye because they didn't make sense. My guess was that they were logging roads, but then why are they more vegetated than the surrounding fields?
Going back in time. They are certainly logging roads. I guess different plants grew on the churned up roads, thus the different colors seen in the last image."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"This was a pit of an optical illusion. At first it looked like a pyramid, but the coastline is a bluff, so it must be the inverse of a pyramid. My guess is an abandoned evil villain's mansion."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"More ships near Tombua, Angola. These might have been intentionally abandoned. They were also not here in the 2003 pics."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
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"A tug boat working barges on the Mississippi River in my home state to Louisiana (USA). Each rectangular barge is ~195 by 35 feet (59.4 m × 10.7 m)."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"I've always been intrigued by these small boggy pond things. Then often have a "spearpoint" shape and share a common orientation. I don't know why they do that.
Oil wells positioned between those funny ponds."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"Image 1: Cool old forts around Antwerp. They look like a maple leaf.
Image 2: More of the forts. There is a large line of them. Presumably they were once around the outskirts of the city, but are now very much incorporated. The flat side with the "stem" is facing the enemy. I've never seen forts built like this
Image 3: These 2 were blurred by GE. I've seen this with military properties in Europe. I wonder why just these 2 were blurred. I wonder what goes on there..."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"Icebergs and meltwater mixing with seawater.
More of the same. If you stare at the water long enough it seems like you are staring through trees are the night sky."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"The coast of Belgium. You can plainly see the long shore current at work here. It's flowing from the NE to the SW. The rock walls are there to slow the transport, and potential removal, of sand."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"An active volcanic island in the Pacific Ocean. Look at the beautiful basaltic lava flow on the SE corner. This was the result of an eruption from late 1952 to 1953."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"This might look like an imaging problem, but it's actually patterns of logging in Northern California (USA). I'm not sure why they do it this way. It must have something to do with limiting the area that's clear cut at any one time."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"An unnamed (on GE) village in Namibia. It looks uninhabited, but it could just not have any cars to leave tracks. The tracks could also just be covered up by blown sediments. It could also be a seasonally inhabited fishing village."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"This is in the Punjab region of India. It seems like every inch of land here is planted, except for this part. I can't find any info on this place."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"This is not the famous "Eye of the Sahara," but another exposed geologic dome.It seems like the road is more of a suggestion in this region. All of those lines are tire tracks."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"A cruise ship watching ice break away from a glacier. I've been on one of these cruises. This was my favorite part of the trip."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"This is a glacier in Switzerland. The dark colored parts are caused by sediment being exposed on top of the ice. The regularity of the banding suggests it's caused by something pretty cyclic, like the seasons. I don't know which conditions would make more exposed sediment. It looks kind of like an upside down snake."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"This is a tiny island off the Libyan coast. GE includes some bathymetry data for most ocean basins, but it is not very high definition. Here we clearly see a reef in the photo, that doesn't show up in the light blue part (bathymetry data). If we zoom out, you can just barely see the reef"
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"This is a huge peninsula on the coast of Western Sahara. Looks like a large community on the tip. Wrong. It's all boats. That's a lot of boats."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"The trans-Alaska pipeline crossing a river colored by rock flour.
That same river entering another river that's clouded with grayish sediment."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"The island is called Nggela of the Solomon Islands. If you go looking for it, turn off "places" or the quest will be spoiled.
Another ship wreck near a small village of the same island"
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"A relatively older wreck on Baia dos Tigres (whatever that means). Sand migration is moving the shoreline away from the wreck."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"This is an incredibly boggy area in Siberia. There is an oilfield in the NE corner. Image trying to travel across this in the summer... I guess an airboat would be the only option."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"The Atlantic Mid Ocean Ridge:
The largest mountain ranges in the world (the various mid ocean ridges) were not discovered until after WWII! The navy funded many sonar studies to better understand subsea hazards. This data gave geologists the missing pieces to finally understand how continents moved. The resulting theory of plate tectonics answered innumerable important geologic questions that we take for granted today. All of this stuff happened fairly recently too. I know a few older geologists who were not taught plate tectonics in college.
The image above is cool because we see the offset/stair-step nature of rift zones. Why transform faults? Well, the rifting of oceanic crust is a very brittle operation. It can't just move apart along a straight line. The rift has to accommodate curves from the spherical nature of the Earth and the curved nature of continental crust boundaries. The transform faults are how that curvature is dealt with."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"This might not look like a very impressive delta, but it is. This was the home of Dick Proenneke, a homesteader who was immortalized in the documentary series "Alone in the Wilderness." The river is called Hope Creek. His cabin was just to the north of the mouth."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"Present day mid city neighborhood of New Orleans, LA (USA). Looks pretty normal.
Here it is the day after Hurricane Katrina. Things are a bit flooded."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"Some very sinuous tidal channels/lowland drainages on Florida's Gulf coast. This one is kinda spooky if you just focus on the dark water."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"This is part of the port of Dunkirk, France. The only way into this area is through the channel at the top of the image. Obviously these ships with the helipads got in there, but it must have been very tight..."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"Ships on the Suez Canal keeping a good and precise distance between each other. Even a slow moving ship needs a lot of room to stop. Here's a big container ship in the Suez Canal."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
The hot spot of Hawaii. Simply put, a hot spot is where magma from the mantle punches through the ridged crust making volcanos. Hot spots remain relatively stationary, and the overriding crust moves. So the crust is constantly sliding over a spot that occasionally punches a mountain up through it. That's the case here. The big island of Hawaii is currently over the spot. The other islands were over the spot but have since moved, forming a chain. You can see how the mountain chain makes an abrupt turn. This is indicative of the Pacific Plate changing its direction of travel in the past
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"The Gulf of Mexico is my favorite basin. This is not only because I'm from Louisiana, but because it's arguably the most complicated basin in the world. Compare the cont. shelf edge off the Florida coast vs. the Louisiana coast. The Louisiana shelf is very bubbly looking, almost like it's oozing out onto the ocean floor. That is pretty much what's happening. Huge subsurface salt deposits are being squeezed out by the weight of newer sediments deposited on top of it. There are corresponding salt deposits off the Mexican coast as well. The Gulf did not open evenly, but in a rotational fashion with a pivot point somewhere off the Yucatan."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"The Platte River in Nebraska (USA). The mid-channel bars are clearly visible here. There is some old saying about this river that goes something like, "1 mile wide and 1 foot deep." Or something like that."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"This is the flood plain of the Danube River in Hungary. We can see an old oxbow lake W of Makad and lots of evidence of past natural levees (all the swirly lines)."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"I've never seen a river meander in such a zig-zag way, as opposed to a loopy way. I have no idea why it does that.
Another river in the same area. weird."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"This is the Uinta Mountain chain of Utah. It's not often you get to see an entire mountain range in one view. Thanks Google Earth."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"This is a random mountain in the Alaska Range. This is what happens when rock layers are uplifted but not tilted. All of these contacts are horizontal, leading to the stair-step appearance. You can tell they are horizontal because the distance between 2 contacts in map view is the same from one place to another."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"This looked like some sort of mine. I didn't know what kind of ore or mineral could be mined from a cinder cone. Turns out that was very easy to learn. I just googled "cinder cone mine" and this one was the first result. Turns out you mine "lava rocks" from this type of volcano... duh. This is an abandoned mine called the Aiken Cinder Mine. Apparently they just walked away from the operation and left all the equipment. According to the internet, you can drive to it and explore."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"These are some nice canyons on the Libyan coast. Since the canyons meander, the river that formed them existed before the area was uplifted, which allowed the rivers to incise and form the canyons."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"I call this one "erosion." The center is a plateau being eaten away on both sides. It also looks like when people burn wood with electricity."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"Note the delta of the Yukon River just south of the 'Norton Sound' label. Now note Whitehorse YT. That is the longest known freshwater salmon migration in the world! Over 3000km! That's unbelievable, esp since the salmon don't eat once they enter freshwater."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"A cool geology one. The W half of the picture shows lines that parallel the coastline then verge landward. This area was build out to see by longshore transport of sand. Then it was covered by the dunes you see in the E half."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"The Appalachian foothills of West Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky. I noticed all of the lighter colored areas. Usually things like that are cities. In this case, it's all surface coal mines. I had no idea there were so many of them."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"Zoomed out shot of the Zambezi River. Do you see the geometric nature of the features here? It looks like cracks interesting at about 60 deg on the acute angle and 120 deg on the obtuse. This is likely some regional jointing (geology for big cracks). You can see areas where the river follows the joints and cuts across others. This suggests the river incised into it's valley very quickly due to uplift of the land. This is the same reason that the Colorado River is meandering despite being in a deep canyon. If the uplift is quick, the river can't adjust it's course in time and is trapped (relatively speaking)."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"This is in the Sahara Dessert. This pattern is very cool. I'm guessing the NE-SW trending lines are the result of prevailing winds shaping the sands and rocks. Notice how things are funneled between the 2 mountainous areas."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"This is in Western Sahara. It is a great example of a drainage divide. The jagged line running roughly W-E is such a divide. Drainage patterns S of the line drain S, N of the line drains N."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"The Caribbean:
This area is very complex and I don't know very much about it. The image shows how cool it is to have satellite pictures and bathymetry in one image. Adding in the seafloor feature explains why these islands have their shape. Look at the SW edge of Cuba and the NW and SW peninsulas of Haiti. All of these features are explained by how the underlying plates are interacting. You can see a small oceanic spreading center (rift) just south of Grand Cayman."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"The circular feature here currently a slight depression. That depression is the only evidence for the largest domestic explosion in the UK's history. At least I think this is it. I was lead to the area by some info from an old forum."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"This is what happens when a river isn't powerful enough to beat the ocean at its delta. The longshore currents have crossed the river's delta."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"The delta of the Mississippi River in SE Louisiana. New Orleans (my home city) is the developed part in the NE corner. This is a good exercise in determining vegetation from sat. images. The dark green parts are freshwater swamps (wooded). The light green and grey is developed (cleared) land. Now, as in the times of the Native Americans, settlement in this area is along the natural levees of the river and its distributaries. This can be plainly seen in the image. The brownish-green parts, between the dark green and open water, are fresh and brackish marshes. Further out we see the skeletal remains of saltwater marshes. Louisiana has some unbelievable rates of coastal land loss from subsidence and erosion of the salt marshes. It's a very complex and interesting topic and worth researching."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"It's the NE shores of Hudson Bay, all tundra. Note the area that trends almost W-E and shows lineations. It's certainly different from the surrounding areas. My guess is it's a very old suture zone where a small piece of continental crust accreted onto the Canadian Craton perhaps billions of years ago. I was only able to find a very blurry geologic map that shows this area as a fault zone. That supports my theory."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"This is somewhere in Labrador. The 'swirlyness' must mean there are some very metamorphosed bedrock. They are probably crazy old too."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"Fort Travis, guarding the entrance to Galveston Bay, Texas. This isn't quite as cool as the much older forts in Europe. I think the "modernness" of it makes it also cool. Some of these batteries were active as recently as WWII. Most people don't think about military action in the continental US during WWII. Naval actions did happen in US waters, and coastal defense was a real concern."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"Barrier island restoration in coastal LA. This is a before picture from 2010.
After picture. This might seem counterintuitive on a non-rocky coastline, but the biggest engineering challenge of making these barrier islands is finding enough sand. The Mississippi River delta is predominantly mud (silt and clay)."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"The marshes of coastal LA. See all those white dots to the left of the road. Those are all boats that were washed away during Katrina. It's very difficult to retrieve them from the marsh, so they just sit there and rot."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"Oh nooooo. Watch out for the bank! Just kidding. Barges purposely push into the bank to hold their position. This is the Mississippi River around New Orleans, LA."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"The eastern coast of Madagascar. Notice the arid looking interior and green coastal zone. Looks like it's pretty lush huh? Zooming in. Well, it's looking less lush. All of the light green in the first pic is areas of deforestation."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"Some white things connected with paths in Botswana, just NE of the Okavango Delta. I see lots of settlements that look like this on sat pictures. Lets zoom in and see."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report
"A lake in northern Canada. The lake surface is frozen and those are big cracks. The irregular surface of the ice made it look like ripples on water."
geologistsmakethebedrock Report