Google-eye view of a nuclear test site

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Yucca Flat was the site of 739 nuclear tests between 1951 and 1992. Once an anonymous stretch of desert, it's now pockmarked with subsidence craters left behind by underground nuclear detonations. Among them is the Sedan Crater, a massive, 1200-feet-wide, 320-feet-deep pit, created as part of "plowshare" experiments—tests meant to demonstrate whether nuclear bombs could be used for peaceful purposes, like excavating new lakes or deep bays.

(Via Sean Carroll)

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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Michael Metacyclotron

Are any nuclear test sites visible from regular flight paths? I’ve seen similar giant domes when flying, my first thought was that they were test sites.
- Dean W. Armstrong
  
  These sites are easily visible on the Reno-Las Vegas flights.
  
  You can go on a tour of the now-renamed Nevada National Security Site and see the Sedan crater and the Frenchman Flat atmospheric testing sites up close and personal! http://www.nv.doe.gov/outreach/tours.aspx
Anonymous

Flag on the moon…
Larry7

Pockmarked?
I always thought it was potmarked…

… I’ll be over here.

:\
GavinD

Interesting bit of illusion here. The shadow is on the “bottom” of those pits, so when I looked at the picture before reading the article, I thought they were a bunch of little hills.
sindark

You can get a better sense of the scale of the Nevada Test Site by zooming out more:

http://www.sindark.com/2006/02/20/nuclear-test-sites/
MarkM

That’s strange:
Google Streetview doesn’t work here…
Absorbine_Sr

If I zoom in really close I think I can see Tor Johnson and Coleman Francis.
Mantissa128

Watch these pockmarks appear in a timeline – grab a coffee and sit down to the horror. 2,053 detonations since 1945. Why, why.

Incomprehensible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAnqRQg-W0k
Drang

There’s an unusual but fun museum in Las Vegas called the Atomic Testing Museum. Much information about the equipment and people who put the pockmarks there.
bzishi

Yucca Mountain is next door. It was deemed an unacceptable place to store radioactive materials because of the potential for radioactive material getting into the water supply in a rare seismic event.
Kosmoid

Besides the “plowshare” stuff, it provided a good premise for different movies including “The Beast from Yucca Flats,” with Tor “Super Swedish Angel” Johnson.
- Anonymous
  
  Art? Randy?
mdl4

heh. I blogged this exact same story and map four days ago.
http://www.mdl4.com/2010/10/the-nevada-test-site/
- Anonymous
  
  I blogged the exact same story three months ago.
  
  http://feldsparia.blogspot.com/2010/07/nuclear-testing-as-artastronomy.html
- Anonymous
  
  wow, with way crazier colors and videos
dbarak

They say the strawberries that grow there get to be as big as a man’s head.
VagabondAstronomer

There is a similar site, though done with more conventional means, somewhere in Arizona that was used to train the Apollo astronauts. It was literally modeled after a portion of the lunar surface, with the goal being for the astronauts to approach it in a helicopter much as they would in the LM. It was also used for additional training…
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=2259
Anonymous

I pasted the location to Google Earth and tilted the view, looks a lot better!
Dv Revolutionary

This is an enlightening bit of devastated wasteland to check out on google earth.

This is photo Area 2,4,7,8,9 & 10. Area 51 is an airport and buildings to the north-east of this, just follow the road. Older above ground tests are sprinkled north-west but the craters are not as dramatic. This area is the underground tests, they didn’t all stay underground and like the sedan crater some were colossal fnuck-ups.

Your link doesn’t mention that but Sedan was a much bigger release than anticipated. It went atmospheric and irradiated 7% of the american population and caused thousands of cases of Leukemia back when that was not curable. Let me put it in real terms: thousands of children died just because of that one.

The Plowshare and the Atoms for Peace movements were not peace movements they were hawks like Eisenhower and Edward Teller co-opting the language of peace to clam the public and co-opt/discredit actual peace talk by the likes of Einstein and Oppenheimer.
- benher
  
  Sir, do you mean to suggest that one of our political elite would hi-jack language to serve their own interests?
  That doesn’t sound very Patriotic – don’t you know that Freedom is at stake? We can’t let the Terrorists will win!
VagabondAstronomer

Ah, here it is…
http://tinyurl.com/26okcod