Any video that’s about somebody seeing something weird on Google Maps and digging into it fascinates me. Christophe Haubursin’s show Tunnel Vision investigates the purpose behind some odd patterns in the Iranian desert.
Something about the style of the video felt strangely familiar to me, so I looked over the other videos Haubursin—a senior producer for #Vox’s video team—created for Vox. Sure enough, he did What’s inside this crater in Madagascar?, which is also highly worth watching.
I think the satellite and street-view imagery provided by Google Maps is one of the most under-appreciated resources on the internet. Similar to #Wikipedia, most of us probably use it primarily when we need to look up something specific, but you really could—and I do—spend hours just browsing it. It’s a view of the world—the entire planet!—that even just forty years ago would have seemed near-godlike in scope and power.