What do you get when you take 600km of river, US$100 billion, 27 million cubic meters of concrete, 14 million people displaced, environmental devastation … just some of the facts about the world’s largest hydropower plant, the Three Gorges Dam in China.
NASA: Yangtze River – May 2001, Bottom – March 2003
Even though it’s not yet fully functional the impact of the project is already apparent from space and truly an engineering marvel, if ethically and technically questionable. It’s a big price for a system which will only provide 3% of China’s power needs.
The pictures were taken by NASA as is linked in the credit below it… the colours are not real as the human eye percieves light. I suspect it was taken in infra-red to highlight the difference between land and water but I could be wrong.
Indeed they are cool pics!
Cool pics, Dave. where did u get them from? Are those colours real or not?