The View From Above: This creepy ship graveyard has a sinister explanation.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

This creepy ship graveyard has a sinister explanation.

(Click photo to enlarge)

20°52'6.44"N 17° 2'50.79"W

This has got to be one of the eeriest places on the planet. The ships pictured here at Nouadhibou, Mauritania (formerly Port-Étienne) are just a few of the hundreds of ships that have been abandoned here to rot in a ship's graveyard. For years, Mauritanian harbor officers were so corrupt, that they let ships be discarded in the harbor in exchange for wads of cash. Disposing of ships legally can be quite expensive for a company, so during this period, lots of unwanted ships ended up here... over 300 in all.

1 comment:

JulieJune 23, 2009 at 7:00 PM
This is an an awesome blog. I can't wait to read the whole thing! I spend a lot of time poking around Google Earth myself. Thanks for this.
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Why "View From Above"

I have an unquenchable thirst for exploration and mysteries. But that isn't the only reason for "View From Above." This blog exists primarily thanks to the despicable ignorance and laziness of the many, many people who will post a picture of some anomaly and simply make guesses about it, rather than do five minutes worth of research. I can't count the many times I've seen aerial pictures of "UFOs parked in a row on the beach" (They're beach umbrellas, you dork!) or questions like, "What's this aircraft doing sitting in the middle of the desert?" (It's a military firing range. They use junk aircraft as targets. Duh!) The unwillingness on the part of most people to do even a minimal amount of research just boggles the mind.

Another pet peeve of mine is the practice of posting an interesting site without a precise location. I don't know if it's laziness, oversight, or a desire to hoard information, but it's irritating as hell to me. That's why mosts of my posts will always include coordinates to the site.

I hope you'll enjoy perusing the sites I've listed. I can't take credit for being the first to "find" most of them, but I will do my best to let you know what I find out about them!

Michael Makai