I’ve been known to spend hours with a map, just studying where roads go. It’s something I’ve done since being a kid, trying to pass those hours away as we made our way on one of many road trips that usually ended at some relatives. That landed me the role of navigator on many excursions because I learned how to read maps that well.

So naturally, I can get lost into the depths of Google Maps, and there was something really interesting, at least to me, that I discovered last night.

The Nevada Test and Training Range[wiki] has a large portion of the range mapped now by Google Maps satellites(and apparently it’s even cooler in Google Earth). Now this gets even more interesting to me because I’m enthralled, like many, with the whole Area 51[wiki] phenomenon. It’s not so much the UFOs as it is the fact that the perimeter to the range is patrolled by unmarked vehicles and signs boast the use of deadly force being authorized if you are caught trespassing.

I’ve seen enough “declassified” aerial photos to have spotted the area from pretty far away to have spotted it, and you can get pretty far down to the Groom Lake base. For years, they said nothing was there. Now they play the hand that they have nothing to hide, but who knows what top secret technology is developed when the satellites aren’t looking.

I parsed through other parts of the range because I was curious to see if there were any sites of the range being used for target practice. After all, that is where the U.S. military can go play with live ammunition and get real experience dropping bombs.

Speaking of bombs, this is where nukes were tested for years, above and below ground. Looking around for evidence of massive blast sites, I found this.

What made that crater, I can’t be sure. You can be assured that the area is massive though. Some quick and rough calculations come up with this being just over 400 meters in diameter. Whatever went boom there was a sizable explosive.

For the sake of comparison, I pulled up a shot of downtown Vancouver to compare the blast zone with an area that I am more familiar with. The important element in doing this was to bring it up at the same aspect ratio as well, which I think I did successfully. Honestly, I found it fairly stunning.

Essentially, the blast zone at the Nevada Test Site is the same size as BC Place[wiki], and that’s not the only crater that I picked on. That’s just something I did as a quick comparison, and it gives you a very eerie feeling about what goes on in a place that is so closely monitored and guarded. As to if this is the result of a nuclear bomb is unclear, but the idea of it being non-nuclear isn’t comforting either.

I know that I’m late to the party on this news, but the discovery is new to me. If you take the time to poke through what you can see, because there are still some areas that are low resolution or simply “not available” for satellite view, you’ll find some interesting stuff.