Artificial Owl is one year old!
To celebrate this first great year of existence, here is a new type of articles called "Best of AO".
They recap the best posts from the past year on a specific subject...Let's start with the 10 most spectacular shipwrecks.
On a completely unrelated note, you can now follow AO on twitter.
Enjoy!
The Artificial Owl
The American Star
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The Ydra
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The Mediterranean Sky
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The Olympia
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The Dimitrios
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The Eden V
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The Murmansk
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The Eduard Bohlen
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The Panagiotis
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The United Malika
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See more shipwrecks on AO [+]
This church is the only remaining building left from the village of San Juan Parangaricutiro, located in the state of Michoacán in Mexico. What happened? Not far from there In 1943 the Volcán de Parícutin started to rise out of a farmer's cornfield. In the following irruption, it buried 2 villages under lava and ashes, including San Juan Parangaricutiro.
The church of San Juan is now an abandoned ruin in the middle of nowhere. During the eruption, the lava flowed around and into the church, and covered 3/4 of the town. Just beneath the church, the old houses and buildings keep buried under the rocks.
No one died from the Parícutin volcano as all residents were evacuated before the villages were covered in lava. At the end of this phase, the volcano had grown 336 metres tall. For the next eight years the volcano would continue erupting.
coordinates : 19°31'59.58"N 102°14'49.88"W
google map
pictures sources : 1 2 3 4 5
text source : 1 2 3
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They might not be the most spectacular shipwrecks you have ever seen, but the story that lead those 2 ships to wreck on the reef coast of new Caledonia is pretty unusual.
Ever Prosperity grounded in 1965
The strange story of the two "Ever Prosperity". They were twin ships ("Liberty ships"), they had same name and same base port in Monrovia, Liberia. The first "Ever Prosperity" went straight up on the West Coast barrier reef in 1965. The second one did exactly same in 1970. It was the same captain, a Korean man, who had been commanding each ship at the time of her grounding!
Ever Prosperity grounded in 1965
Ever Prosperity grounded in 1970
Ever Prosperity grounded in 1970
Ever Prosperity grounded in 1970
coordinates Ever Prosperity 1970 : 22°27'20.70"S 166°22'00.69"E
google map
coordinates Ever Prosperity 1965 : 21°54'38.45"S 165°45'19.01"E
google map
pictures sources : 1 2 3 4 5
text source : 1
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In Cantwell, Alaska you can stop and see this strange construction, a now abandoned 4 story igloo shaped hotel. I would love to get pictures from the inside.
coordinates : 63°11'15.74"N 149°21'35.74"W
google map
pictures sources : 1
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Muynak is a city in northern Karakalpakstan in western Uzbekistan. Home to only a few thousand residents at most, Muynak's population has been declining precipitously since the 1980s due to the recession of the Aral Sea.
Once a bustling fishing community, Muynak is now a shadow of its former self, dozens of miles from the rapidly receding shoreline of the Aral Sea. Fishing had always been part of the economy of the region, and Muynak became a center of industrial fishing and canning. A regional agricultural monoculture dominated by cotton production which diverts water from tributary rivers of the sea into irrigation, and severe pollution caused by agricultural chemical runoff, are causing the sea to evaporate and the water that remains is highly saline and very toxic, causing the ecological disaster which is inevitably destroying the sea and killing the residents of the towns in its vicinity, including Muynak.
Muynak is now home to a incongruous armada of rusting hulks that once made up the proud fishing fleet during the Soviet era. Poisonous dust storms kicked up by strong winds across the dried and polluted seabed give rise to a multitude of chronic and acute illnesses among the few residents, weather unmoderated by the sea now buffets the town with hotter-than-normal summers and colder-than-normal winters.
The Aral Sea was once the world's fourth-largest saline body of water, it has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s, after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet Union irrigation projects. By 2004, the sea had shrunk to 25% of its original surface area, and a nearly fivefold increase in salinity had killed most of its natural flora and fauna. By 2007 it had declined to 10% of its original size, splitting into three separate lakes, two of which are too salty to support fish. The once prosperous fishing industry has been virtually destroyed, and former fishing towns along the original shores have become ship graveyards. With this collapse has come unemployment and economic hardship.
The disappearance of the lake was no surprise to the Soviets; they expected it to happen long before. As early as in 1964, Aleksandr Asarin at the Hydroproject Institute pointed out that the lake was doomed explaining, "It was part of the five-year plans, approved by the council of ministers and the Politburo. Nobody on a lower level would dare to say a word contradicting those plans, even if it was the fate of the Aral Sea."
Shrinkage of the Aral sea between 1989 and 2008
coordinates : 43°46'28.87"N 59°02'20.02"E
google map
pictures sources : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
text source : 1 2
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