Not many travel guides mention these underground systems, creepy tunnels and enormous caverns, located sometimes right under our feet. Most were originally classified (no doubt by Sector Seven), and only recently open to the public. Some are still impossible to enter (due to blocked access points) and hard to explore in their entirety (due to the lost or confusing documentation). But this is where the "spirit of adventure" comes in, as multitudes of amateur photographers descend into the unknown to bring back evidence of things unseen.
1. Abandoned Salt Mine, Romania
We'll start in Cluj County, Romania. The following epic photographs were taken by Marius R. inside the old closed Turda Salt Mine (Google Earth coordinates: Lat: 46°33'51.92"N - Long: 23°46'7.22"E) (Middle-Earth coordinates: Mines of Moria) - click to enlarge images.
The closed mine has long tunnels, and a deep natural cave. The excavations dug a huge artificial cave, in which you could fit three 10-story blocks. Marius says: "you can play football inside of them; and you enter there by bus".
Area 825 (built between 1957 and 1961) - A huge system of tunnels, filled with water - bringing to mind somewhat apocalyptic (or Half-Life) images; this once was the ultimate secret Soviet nuclear submarine base, maintenance & repair facility. So secret it was, in fact, that the whole town around it was classified and erased from the map.
Ten kilometers east of Sevastopol on the Black Sea Coast, the town of Balaklava was closed to the rest of the USSR, and even family members needed special clearance to visit there. After collapse of the Soviet Union the base stayed operational only until 1993, when all nuclear warheads were removed - and in 1996 the last submarine left the base. Today the place is open to visitors, but the bulk of it is hidden and probably holds more secrets than Russian officials care to reveal. (Photos by Russos, with permission.)
Built 126 meters deep underground, the Project 825 also served as a nuclear shelter for 3000 people; it could hold up to nine nuclear submarines at one time; the length of the underground tunnel - half a kilometer, water 9 meters deep.
The cart shown on this photograph was used for transportation of nuclear bombs to the loading area. Next photo - the "Holy of Holies" - Nuclear Weapons Storage Room. Note the reinforced doors (weight 16 tons each):
Apparently Russians can build underground structures and tunnels very well (witness the superb Moscow Metro system). This experience will prove handy when another mega-project takes place: The longest tunnel from Russia to Alaska. According to a preliminary report this tremendous undersea tunnel would contain a high-speed railway, highway and pipelines - all 64 miles of it.
3. Cincinnati's Abandoned Subway
Over in America, there are decaying underground spaces on a huge scale, as well. This Cincinnati Transit site documents all the structures and stations of this unfinished subway transit system, built from 1920 to 1925. Fully seven miles of tunnels, bridges and stations were abandoned in the end, no track was ever put in, and no passengers ever rode the trains.
Three underground stations still exist, but the above-ground structures were demolished, leaving only a few barely-visible access points into the vast underground territory.
One such entry point:
Map of a hidden subway line (one of many):
A similar tunnel system (but build in the 70s) runs underneath downtown core in the city of Calgary, Canada. The LRT (Light Transit System) line was meant to run underground, but the plans were shelved for the financial reasons. There are a few doors in Calgary leading to this explorer's playground, to tunnels wide enough for rush hour traffic.
4. G-CANS: Tokyo Storm Water System
Here is something truly enormous, worthy of Japanese crazed super-scale imagination - vast caverns and otherworldly columns (looking like some kind of a temple) under Tokyo - an infrastructure "built for preventing overflow of the city's major waterways and rivers during rain and typhoon season".
Brainchild of Japan Institute of Wastewater Engineering Technology (JIWET), this "sci-fi"-like installation consists of "five 32m diameter, 65m deep concrete containment silos, connected by 64 kilometers of tunnels 50 meters deep underground. The system is powered by 14000 horsepower turbines which can pump 200 tons of water a second into a nearby river." See more pictures of this incredible place here and here.
(images copyright: 2005 EDOGAWA RIVER OFFICE) Further sources: 1, 2, via
No matter how complex and well hidden underground structures are, dedicated urban explorers are proving that they can - and will - penetrate any mysterious catacombs and come out with spectacular reports.
OK I call hoax on that Calgary abandoned subway pic. I lived there during the 70s and early 80s during LRT construction (C-Train) and although there is one short underground portion soth of downtown (Cemetery Hill), there were never any tunnels built under the downtown area, all the lines were planned from the outset to run along the 7th avenue Transit Mall.
I have a hard time figuring out where in Calgary that alleged photo is from, there are no obvious identifying landmarks. Source?
The information about Calgary's tunnel under downtown can be found in the book "Calgary- Secrets of the City". I would list author and publisher but alas my books are packed at the moment
Stampede city gal..... I have lived here all my 32 years and in fact the tunnels do exist. If you go to the alderman's level of city hall parkade, there is a steel ladder. This descends to below the parkade, where the ORIGINAL plans for part of 7th ave c-train lines run. You can do a search and find them. There has been some hoopla about what to do with this vast amount of opens space built below the existing lines. There have even been suggestions in the Calgary herald about using it as part of the Downtown Public library!
If you have ever ridden the c-train just as you leave the Victoria park train station and head into downtown it is a very short, but completely underground section(before the cemetery which is south of the Erlton station) As you are surfacing, you can plainly see where the tunnel was suppose to branch into two, where it would connect UNDER city hall, not go around it as it does now.
I love this site, London underground lost stations would make a great addition to this list. Some stations can be glimpsed whilst travelling in on the central line [they still have the original posters etc when they were sealed up from above] Fans of all your posts The Wykeman
I had seen those shadow sculptures about a month ago and decided to try and achieve one myself. I created the shadow of a cat. There is a picture located here: http://nicolerae365.blogspot.com/2007/07/shadow-art.html
No matter how hard I try, I can't see that girl spinning clockwise, but I think it's actually a mental map problem in my case. You see, I know how to dance, so the only logical way to spin is with the leg trailing, so my brain automatically rejects the alternate interpretation.
The Ferris Wheel right after it works fine, but the green dot doesn't get to eat all the magenta ones— tricksy little guys keep popping back up.
its indeed cheaper to recover any lost data in Africa than in the west send your damaged Drives,Corrupt RAID Servers to East African Data Handlers, ITS CHEAPER TO RECOVER YOU ALL YOUR LOST DATA!
B.Durbin it sounds like the problem is that you are looking at it as the same leg. Don't think of it as one leg either trailing or leading, rather think of it as the right leg trailing for it to spin in one direction, then think of it as the left leg trailing and it will spin in the other direction.
The trick with the spinning girl is to concentrate on the shadow of her toes on the leading foot.If you catch it just as it comes into view on the left side, she reverses direction...then on the right side, she reverses direction again. Quite an amazing little illusion. Thanks, Stephen B.
Oh my. After staring at the spinning girl for about 15 minutes, I was able to make her switch directions whenever I wanted 'her' to. The downside is, I now have a bad headache.
The second "Nameless" wonder is M-505 Adams Brothers Probe 16 made in 1969. It was used as a Durango 95, a stolen sport car, in Staley Kubrick's "Clockwork Orange" movie.
Why does Dave Major keep ruining perfectly good Isettas?
I suspect the black, unidentified propeller car is heavily modified, but it looks more like a Tatra than anything else, especially in the rear of the greenhouse.
Sigivald is absolutely right. The black unidentified propeller car is indeed a Tatra 77 from the middle 1930's. It was a car with a rear air-cooled V8 engine, but with a not-so-good performance, capable only of 100 miles per hour.
The car of the foto is not a much modified 77, except for the propeller mounting. Remember that most of the cars of that time used several bodymakers for the same model, and so, the style varied somewhat.
I love art cars and that is why I started my own. I have a 1981 Mercedes Benz 300SD covered in close to 6000 pens. I call it Mercedes Pens and I am The Pen Guy
This car you can´t identify is made from TATRA 805 or maybe TATRAPLAN...that is the base for the showed tunning... the cars were producted in Czechoslovakia... in the Company Museum in the hometown (Koprivnice) of the Tatra factory is even very similar snow-car drove by a propeler and - additionaly and optionaly(in the case of very haevy terain) by a belt-track...
Don't forget the biggest difference between prison and your cubicle -
In prison, you never get to leave and go home. you have no freedom, no possessions, no money, and no choice in where you live or what you eat. And no one particularly cares if you are terrorized, molested, or beaten - or if you die from anything anyone does to you.
there is a small addendum to that story of the 5 failed safeties (out of six) .. unfortunately i never could find independent confirmation except in the book of a very respected austrian journaillist ... but perhaps a blogger can help ..
that incident prompted the US government to start a masive research project to improve the safeties in nuclear devices .. the results of this research project were quickly incorporated in the existing bombs .. AND .. here it comes:
the results were also supposedly leaked to the government of the CCCP because of the fear that a similar accident in russia could perhaps start an accidental war ..
Very cool, Anonymous! Wish I had that info when I did the piece -- would have been a great addition. I, for one, am packing my beans and heading for the hills .. and that's NOT taking into account the technological 'expertise' of countries like Russia, France, Pakistan, India (shudder)
I do kinda hate to break it to you, but a drop, collision, or even explosion won't create the nuclear fission/fusion explosion that is the worry about nuclear weapons. The basic idea of a fission explosion is wrapping a sphere with explosives so the sphere will implode quickly enough that it will explode. Thermonuclear added more stages to create a bigger secondary explosion. But the difficultly in creating a spherical implosion is what prevents the average terrorist from making one. The Rosenburgs were executed when they passed secrets dealing with this to the Russian. That same difficulty is what prevents an accidental nuclear explosion. Don't spread FUD. There are very legitimate fears you sort of addressed: Random weapons-grade materials and pre-made bombs missing, and the possibility of the conventional explosives spreading radioactive particles that really could cause alot of death. Plutonium has a lethal toxicity easily ranked in the parts per billion. So there is definately legitimate concerns - just don't blow them to far out of porportion. I'd hate to see you have to get sued to pay alot of people's laundry bills.
The only way to set off a fission bomb is for the outer shell of conventional warheads to all detonate within a few microseconds of each other. This just wont happen in the case of a drop or some other mishap. These devices require finely tuned electronic circuits to initiate simultaneous detonation.
I like your government-bashing energy, but please use it somewhere where the government is actually at fault.
My dad dropped a nuclear bomb while loading it on a plane on a Turkish runway during the Vietnam War. It rolled down the runway before they caught up to it. The officer who saw it said not to tell any one, because such accidents make it all the way to the president.
But your post is alarmist. It's clear that you're trying to maximize fear. I don't think that's very responsible, and it shows a clear misunderstanding of the technologies you discuss.
The public's fear of the atom is reminiscent of the fear of electricity in the late 19th and early 20th century. Why don't you write a post about the dangers of electricity and associated accidents?
We're not going to be driving hydrogen cars tomorrow. Get used to the fact that harnessing the power of the atom is the most promising way forward /right now/.
I worked with one of the guys on the crew at the silo near Little Rock, AR, and he tells a bit of a different story.
Basically, someone dropped a huge wrench from the top of the silo, and as it bounced between the wall and the missile, it punctured the fuel tank. As the rocket fuel leaked out, the tank lost pressure and the rocket finally lost its support, crumpled, and exploded.
But this didn't happen suddenly. The leak took hours and hours to hit that critical drop in pressure. They evac'd the silo and everyone near it, but said nothing to the people living just miles away.
This is like saying a society is violent and dangerous because people get angry, even if the murder rate is zero.
BTW: Bombs decay and become non fissionable over time, especially if they are banged around and older than 15 years. So the fear mongering over the one's out there isn't even founded in reality.
this article shows a complete lack of understanding of how nuclear warheads work, as well as a blatant misuse of the word "thermonuclear" (that only applies to fusion, not fission). It's completely inaccurate to imply that any of those had a chance of going off.
You couldn't be more wrong on the story about two bombs landing in waterlogged famrland. A quick internet search reveals thatwhile two weapons were lost when the plane malfunctioned, the second one is not out there going "tick tick tick". In fact, they found the impact crater the bomb made and recovered a substantial portion of the material from the bomb after digging up to 22'. Heavy rainfall forced the abandonment of the recovery and the Air Force bought the land to prevent further digging. See this link for a factual description of events, it's much than this bullshit. http://www.ibiblio.org/bomb/hansen_doc.html
As JJ said, it is extremely difficult for a nuclear or thermonuclear weapon to go off accidentally. Unless every segment of the explosive shell is triggered simultaneously to create a uniform implosion wave that smoothly compresses your fissionable core to supercriticality, you're going to just get a messy conventional explosion that tosses fissionable material around. (Worst case is a fizzle where you get momentary criticality and a yield equivalent to a few tons.) Any weapon that's been sitting underwater for any length of time is going to be in much too bad a shape to have any meaningful risk of fission detonation.
This refers to implosion weapons, of course -- uranium-gun weapons are more rugged and mechanically straightforward, but they're also inefficient and have not been a part of the US arsenal for many decades.
Accidental detonation of a fusion weapon is even more vastly unlikely, since it requires a clean and efficient detonation of the fission primary to reach the temperatures necessary to initiate a fusion burn in the deuterium fuel.
Two other points: David Kraft, if only we had safe thermonuclear energy! So far the only way anyone's figured out to get more energy out a fusion reaction than you put in is a bomb, and the practical applications are limited. We've got plenty of (more or less safe) nuclear power, but no thermonuclear.
And, regarding leaking safeguard technology to the Soviets: certainly sounds plausible enough. I know that after PAL (Permissive Action Link) technology was developed in the US to prevent unauthorized launch or detonation of weapons, it was quite intentionally leaked to the Soviet Union, and to China when they began to develop their arsenal. The idea was to minimize the chance of a rogue military commander launching his weapons at the U.S. without authorization.
Thanks to all of you great folks for your fun and/or informative comments on my little piece on nuclear weapon boo-boos. I especially appreciate the technical info that’s been put out, especially since I’m a writer and not an engineer. Avi is quite correct to place an amendment to the piece about how unlikely an actual nuclear detonation is. I also just learned (thanks Jon) that the supposedly “tick, tick, ticking” bomb that was dropped on North Carolina was recovered – though that it impacted at 700 mph doesn’t make me feel any better.
However (and didn’t you know this was coming) I still feel the spirit of the piece is still very much intact. I am not anti-government, anti-military, anti-nuclear, anti-America, or anti-much-of-anything: I just wanted to share with folks who are into odd and unusual history that there have been a considerable number of pants-staining mistakes made regarding the most dangerous device ever created.
Or, to put it in bad movie language: “I don't know what's scarier, losing a nuclear weapon or that it happens so often there's actually a term for it,” from Broken Arrow, starring the world’s favorite Scientologist, John Travolta.
In a follow-up piece I’ll be talking about something REALLY scary: screw-ups involving biological and chemical weapons.
Wow ... as scary as the article itself is, I can't believe the sheer naivete of the comments here. The people who've said either that losing nukes is no biggie, or that nuclear power is safe, need to do more research &/or seek professional help.
Nukes are not candy. Once lost, they can easily fall into the hands of unsavoury folks ... or simply leak extremely dangerous & long-lived isotopes into the environment. Explode, no - but they can still kill.
We have yet to invent a foolproof storage system for n-waste, & I doubt any such system is even physically possible. Wind, tidal & solar are all cheap & clean alternatives. We have no excuses left for continuing to neglect them in 2007.
Go tell former residents of Chernobyl how "safe" nuclear power is - they'll be relieved to hear it - the ones not dead of cancer yet, that is. The immediate death toll from that ONE accident is unknown, but indirect deaths from carcinomas likely number in the millions.
We need to avoid use of a technology that's both deadly & obscenely expensive, while we still can.
jim, no one has said that losing nukes is "no biggie". Most of these are reasonable comments pointing out that fears of a nuclear explosion from dropping a warhead are unfounded.
And before you cast stones, you should get your own facts straight. Regarding Chernobyl, you say "The immediate death toll from that ONE accident is unknown, but indirect deaths from carcinomas likely number in the millions."
Rubbish. While certainly a horrible tragedy that should never have happened, the death toll is estimated to be less than 10,000.
Your "glowing" test area is nothing more than a broad, largely empty desert valley with some roads and an old farm house. Of course, if you know the history of it, it really is amazing, but at first glance it is nothing much to look at.
I love the whiners crying "waa FUD waa". Wonder how many "terrists" would love to get their hands on one, just for the scrap inside? You FUD-monkeys would shit your panties if one was found on your block.
I loved reading all of this. My husband worked at Ellsworth with the trailers & equipment they use to load & repair the B-1b Lancer. Not nuke carrying capable right now, but in 24hrs they can convert the whole fleet back to being able to carry nukes. :P
Bombs in general, information & such is interesting to me at the moment, My husband is going through EOD school here at Eglin AFB. For those of you who do not know what EOD is, it is Explosive Ordinance Disposal. Them guys who disarm those roadside bombs, IEDs and all that sort of stuff.
So I get to hear about the various things he can tell me, without breaking the rules. Interesting to say the very least!
Avi, maybe one of your folks who do articles or yourself could do one specifically on our EOD troops?
My favorite "Oops..." was during the early days of the hydrogen bomb, when they were massive devices.
A bomber parked on the apron at an Air Force base in Alaska was undergoing some minor maintenance when a short released the shackles on a fusion device.
The bomb crashed through the bomb bay doors and partially embedded itself in the tarmac. Making recovery a bit difficult. They knew where it was, but how do you pry a multi-tonne hydrogen bomb out of the pavement? (Very carefully. :-)
I have a short article on fission and fusion weapons here:
At first I was thinking:: "Ha, I'll just live up in the space station......" But noooooooo..... Than I read the other article about one-in-a-million collisions. Now I'm not so much thinking as building an underground facility to survive.
Is anyone else terrified at the thought of all of our deserts covered in solar panels? Although the areas are not productive for humans, they are an important ecosystem and we should not assume that it's useless land we can manipulate in any way without harming it!
I'm a sevillian and I think the Solucar plant is a great idea. We have more than 300 sunny days in the year and someone has done something with all that sun :D
Great images, but I'm confused as to why you placed a nuclear power plant under the "bad" energy sources -- nuclear power is one of the better choices; you get more bang for your buck, and it's far cleaner than coal (which puts out more radiation than nuclear). New pebble bed reactors make a meltdown literally impossible.
Check out this US Carbon Footprint Map, an interactive United States Carbon Footprint Map, illustrating Greenest States. This site has all sorts of stats on individual State energy consumptions, demographics and State energy offices, State Taxes and more...
A bit more about the Solar Tower project in Australia. It is quite different to the other examples given, in that it has no mirrors and heating of water to steam.
It relies on a large green-house-like heating area to heat air that then flows inwards, past wind turbines and up a 1km-tall chimney (the tower).
There's a big difference between tidal and wave power.
All your pictures show tidal systems NOT wave systems.
Tidal would seem to be the far better bet because it is totally predictable and doesn't require some kind of reciprocating device to make it work: A conventional axial turbine is perfect
The panels used with the solar tower are not photovoltaic solar collectors, they are simply steel reflectors mounted on motors which rotate them to follow the sun (heliostatic). The cost of 600 PV panels of THAT size would be pretty damn high, and the idea is to reflect sunlight, not absorb it.
From one of the pixels, As a pixel in Spencer's work many times now I can say Spencer is very much trying to show the humanity of the models, though not the individuality-except in his portraits of individuals. To read accounts by those of us who pose, to see more of Spencer's work, including some of his lesser known individual portraits, come to http://www.spencertunickforum.org
I'm impressed. I work for a photography company, and you know how much of a pain in the butt it is to get a class of high school seniors to form something as simple as a 0 or a 7?
Incidentally, I highly recommend the book Legends of Caltech and its sequel More Legends of Caltech. Utterly chock-full of various pranks, as well as an apparent guide to those scriptwriters who created Real Genius.
Though I have to say that the ones a particular friend of the family was involved in were not written up, probably because nobody would break silence, and so there must be many more pranks which have never made it into print.
Air Force Photo: The other side of the story: On a hot Sat (our day off) we were told to put on white T shirts and fall out. We were marched to the drill field and told were to stand...and that is all. Some guy in a tower took our photos. Some time later these photos were for sale in the BX. Where we told anything...NO, did we get any free photos...NO were we even thanked...of course not we were all Pvt's. Pvt James R. Garrity, Sq BN 4, Fl 2100, Lackland AFB, Tex...some 61 years ago...of ya it was very hot out
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I live in/near Cincinnati & have been dying to explore the subway!
Go and explore the subway then.
OK I call hoax on that Calgary abandoned subway pic. I lived there during the 70s and early 80s during LRT construction (C-Train) and although there is one short underground portion soth of downtown (Cemetery Hill), there were never any tunnels built under the downtown area, all the lines were planned from the outset to run along the 7th avenue Transit Mall.
I have a hard time figuring out where in Calgary that alleged photo is from, there are no obvious identifying landmarks. Source?
there are no photos... but local explorers keep speaking about that. The information is suppressed for obvious reasons.
The information about Calgary's tunnel under downtown can be found in the book "Calgary- Secrets of the City". I would list author and publisher but alas my books are packed at the moment
Stampede city gal..... I have lived here all my 32 years and in fact the tunnels do exist. If you go to the alderman's level of city hall parkade, there is a steel ladder. This descends to below the parkade, where the ORIGINAL plans for part of 7th ave c-train lines run. You can do a search and find them. There has been some hoopla about what to do with this vast amount of opens space built below the existing lines. There have even been suggestions in the Calgary herald about using it as part of the Downtown Public library!
If you have ever ridden the c-train just as you leave the Victoria park train station and head into downtown it is a very short, but completely underground section(before the cemetery which is south of the Erlton station) As you are surfacing, you can plainly see where the tunnel was suppose to branch into two, where it would connect UNDER city hall, not go around it as it does now.
look into it....
Undernead the city of antwerp in Belguim are also kilometers of subway that arent in use.
Here's a very cool documentary about abandoned spaces:
http://www.amazon.com/Echoes-Forgotten-Places/dp/B000EBDHIW/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1214615674&sr=8-1
Good article - had the privilege of seeing a few of these places.
It's hard to qualify the Cincinnati tunnels - they're simply just an abandoned platform with some tunnel stubs - not in the league of GCans!
I tender one of the most amazing, the Niagara Falls tunnels ['confluence']
http://quantum-x.ice.org/episodes/niagara-falls-power-station-confluence-tunnels/
NY's abandonned subways legs also rate a mention
http://sleepycity.net/photo/785/
Thank you for these links... by the way the last link's not working.
Cool, I was there in Balaklava, it's open for visitors, I took about the same pictures :)
This looks so much like Half-Life 2
I love this site, London underground lost stations would make a great addition to this list. Some stations can be glimpsed whilst travelling in on the central line [they still have the original posters etc when they were sealed up from above]
Fans of all your posts
The Wykeman
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