greg hughes - dot net - Area 51 - More fun with Google Maps

Saturday, 16 April 2005

I had to do a bit of eye-balling, but eventually I found it. Supposedly this is imagery showing Area 51 near Rachel, Nevada on Google Maps. Other resources on the web seem to corroborate that (click for a lot of info from a guy who tried this well before I did).

Now, why in the world would they only have low-res imagery of this area??? Escapes me... At least they've blocked out the rooftops of the White House and other critical buildings.

By the way, some people have been wondering what the "lumps" in the ground are to the southwest of Area 51. As it turns out, I don't think that's part of Area 51 at all. My memory tells me that's Areas 1-30 at the Nevada Test Site, if I am not mistaken. And those aren't actually lumps either - they're craters from the underground detonations that have been done at the test site over the years:

Google Maps is just too much fun. Here's the USS John C. Stennis, which is an aircraft carrier that two friends serve on - and it's also the one I spent a week on last year, underway from from Hawaii to San Diego.

I went chasing all this stuff down after FilmDivision uploaded a similar image to Flickr.

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Saturday, 16 April 2005 19:41:39 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Wednesday, 19 April 2006 14:59:21 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

While the primary purpose of the Nevada Test site has been to test nuclear weapons. From 1951 to 1992, a total of 928 tests were conducted at the site. Project plowshare, begun in 1958, sought to develop peaceful uses for nuclear explosives.

These tests were designed to show that nuclear devices could quickly and cheaply move massive amounts of earth in the digging of canals and harbors. The Sedan test, July 6, 1962, was part of this program.

More about the Sedan Crater:

* Sedan CraterThe 104 kiloton thermonuclear device was buried 635 feet below ground level.
* The force of the detonation released seismic energy equivalent to an earthquake of 4.75 magnitude on the Richter Scale.
* The blast moved 6.5 million cubic yards of earth and rock up to 290 feet in the air.
* The resulting crater was 1280 feet across and 320 feet deep.
* The sedan test sent a cloud of radioactivity towards Salt Lake City.
* The Sedan Crater was entered into the National Register of Historic Places on April 1, 1995.
* The test was one of 27 conducted under the Atomic Anergy Commission's Plowshare program.
* The plowshare program was halted in the bid 1970's because of disappointing results and the inability to contain the radioactivity.
* The Nevada Test Site is larger than the state of Rhode Island (1,350 square miles).
* It Opened in December 1950, the site's first nuclear device test, dubbed Able, was an air-drop on January 27, 1951.

Dane

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