From the window of an airplane high above Nevada, the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Facility is a bright flash on the landscape. You can really only appreciate its enormity from the ground: 1,670 acres of desert blanketed with 10,347 billboard-sized mirrors that generate enough electricity to power 75,000 homes.
SEE MORE: The burning beauty of solar energy in the Nevada desert.
Few pause to consider the physical aspect of that last type of data collection: The government taps hundreds of cables that snake across the ocean floor, carrying data around the world.
LEARN MORE: Photos of the submarine internet cables the NSA probably tapped.
Twenty-five lakes dot the scenic Lusatian Lake District in northeast Germany, and every one of them was once a coal mine. You wouldn’t know it by looking at them. Sandy beaches ring blue water where people—more than 180,000 last year alone—swim and sail and enjoy a guided tour of a power plant. No, really. They tour a power plant.
Dutch National Police use eagles to snatch the confounded devices out of the air. You could argue they ought to do this all the time, but police limit the aerial attacks to drones flying over restricted areas.
LEARN MORE: America, let’s invest in some drone-killing eagles.
The French would just as soon forget the Maginot Line. France spent 11 years and $450 million fortifying 450 miles of countryside against German militarization. When the Nazis invaded in May, 1940, they simply went around it.
READ MORE: The epic 450-mile French barrier that couldn’t stop the Nazis.
Imre Potyó spent 12 days waiting to make this amazing photo of mayflies over the Rába river in Hungary. The tiny insects, called Ephoron virgo, are but a few months old when they take to the air at the end of July or start of August. Great swarms appear over the rivers of central Europe at sunset to mate by the millions, only to die by dawn.
READ MORE: Stunning photo captures a blizzard of a million Mayflies.
In the 1980s, a few Burmese Pythons slithered out of their cages and into the Florida Everglades. Today, thousands terrorize its forests and mangroves, gobbling up any unsuspecting animal—cranes, deer, even alligators—they can swallow.
READ MORE: Florida Has a competition to hunt pythons because Florida.
Once a year, the American Museum of Natural History in New York performs a banal yet oddly fascinating ritual: It cleans its life-size model of a blue whale. It is a job almost as big as the whale itself.
READ MORE: Photo of the Week: vacuuming an enormous fake blue whale.
(Source: Wired)
Fabian Hefner was walking near his home in northern Switzerland six months ago when he saw a puddle of gasoline and water on the road. The metallic swirl of color took his breath away and inspired his dazzling series Oil Spill.
SEE MORE: Oil and water don’t mix, but they make for stunning photos.
“I’m always impressed by the size of everything—how we get food for everyone, water for everyone, transportation for everyone,” photographer Cassio Vasconcellos says. “The demands of humanity are getting bigger and bigger.” The photos in this series are a statement on the impact an ever-growing population is having on the planet.
SEE MORE: Thank the flying spaghetti monster this airport isn’t real.
