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.
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Cool pics, Dave. where did u get them from? Are those colours real or not?
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!