THE WORLD'S 18 STRANGEST MAN-MADE ISLANDS

The World's 18 Strangest Man-Made Islands
By Rob Goodier, Popular Mechanics.

Since the ancient Aztecs geoengineered the shoreline of Tenochtitlan, their island capital that became Mexico City, humans have raised land from the water. The prehistoric geoengineers built an island to create a fertile space for farming, but now fake islands abound - and their reasons for existence are not so obvious. Here are 18 of the world's strangest artificial islands.

1. The Uros Floating Reed Islands

Floating reed islands bear homes, schools and even a radio station on Lake Titicaca, which rides the border between Bolivia and Peru. Their inhabitants, the Uros, preserve an old-school artificial island-making technique that their predecessors employed for centuries. They bundle totora reeds - the stalks of the giant bulrush - into floating, shape-shifting masses that change as reeds rot and new ones are lashed on.

Reeds are the backbone of Uros construction. They bundle them to make their islands, homes, their cartoonishly curved boats and even their sails. Walking on the islands is like walking on a giant gummy bear, and if it's not patched well, a foot can go all the way through. Reportedly, the islands are the relics of a prehistoric military strategy: when invaders came, the Uros could slowly drift away.

[More information]

2. Crannógs of Scotland and Ireland

Hundreds of bushy lumps pock the surface of lochs in Ireland and Scotland. Some are restored, and many more have sunken in the centuries since their construction. They're the remains of crannógs, small (usually 200 ft. in diameter) artificial islands that wealthy families built. Why they're there isn't clear, but a good guess is that they were status symbols – the lakeside estates of the prehistoric elite. Also, they were probably easy to defend against attacks.

Some of the crannógs have natural islands or shoals at their core; others are built entirely in open water. To make them, their builders sank a circle of axe-sharpened posts into the lake bed around the island or in open, shallow water. They wove branches and wattle - wooden lattice - between the posts and filled the enclosure with logs, branches, soil and clay. At the centre of the new island, they raised a circular, wooden building. The islanders commuted to shore in canoes, or they built causeways just beneath the surface to conceal them from the crannog-looting scoundrels that roamed the countryside.

[More information] [The Scottish Crannog Centre Website]

3. No Man's Land Fort

In 2008, a middle-aged businessman named Harmesh Pooni fended off his creditors by locking himself inside No Man's Land Fort, a complex in the Solent straight near the Isle of Wight [England]. He had bought the fort only four years prior, and by the time he set foot in it, it had long been converted into a luxury home for eccentric tastes. A newspaper account of Pooni's manoeuvre pointed out that he could weather a standoff for a while: the fort/resort is equipped with generators and a freshwater bore hole. He might even have enjoyed it, since it also has a swimming pool, gym, sauna, tennis courts and bars. Pooni was eventually ousted and the fort-turned mansion now caters to wealthy guests who fly from the mainland to land on one of its two helipads.

No Man's Land is one of four artificial island forts built in the region in the 19th century to defend against sea attacks. Over the decades after their construction, they were outfitted with the latest military hardware, but they were never put to use. They went offline after World War II and migrated to the real estate market in the 1960s. It wasn't until the 1980s that No Man's Land was finally sold. The company that bought it pimped it out with luxury-getaway bling and set the stage for Pooni's barricade.

[Note: No Man’s Land Fort was purchased by Clarenco in April 2012 and plans are now being drawn up to develop it as an unrivalled private island.]

[More information: 1. No Man's Land Fort; 2. The £4m squatter: Property developer barricades himself in Solent sea fortress.] [Video: Glimpse inside No Man's Land fort]

4. Thilafushi, the Garbage Island

Today, a sodden mound of buried garbage caps the former lagoon Thilafalhu, situated just a few miles west of Malé, the capital of the Maldives. The facelift warranted a name change, so Thilafushi, the garbage island was born. It was an emergency measure adopted to solve Male's trash crisis. The island makers dug gigantic pits and used the excavated sand to build up the perimeter. They filled the pits with unsorted garbage, then dug more pits and so it has gone. The fact that the island's discarded water wings, key chains, plastic daquiri cups and innocuous waste is jumbled with lead-acid batteries, asbestos and other toxic materials has some environmental groups concerned. Heavy metals could leech into the water table or the sea, they say, where they could harm people, reefs and other marine wildlife.

Now, industrial plants lease the land above the garbage. Warehouses, boat manufacturers and methane bottlers are some of the operations underway.

[More information: 1. Thilafushi; 2. Thilafushi: Toxic Bomb In The Ocean.] [Thilafushi Corporation Website]

5. Florida's Isola di Lolando

Like low-lying natural islands, sometimes the water gets the best of an artificial island. And while it usually takes a natural disaster to take out a natural island, man-made ones can buckle under their own poor engineering, or their builders can run out of cash partway through construction. The latter is the fate of the Isola di Lolando, which now merely pokes above the water in Florida's north Biscayne Bay near Miami Beach.

The project's nosedive sounds eerily familiar: it was a victim of a Miami real estate bubble that burst in the 1920s. The bust of the land boom, coupled with the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, froze the expansion of the Venetian Islands, one of which would have been the partially constructed Lolando.

[More information] [More images]

6. Northstar Island

British Petroleum built Northstar Island in the Beaufort Sea six miles north of the Alaskan coast to siphon off the Northstar Oil Pool, which resides about 12,500 feet below the seabed. The island is a workaround for an ice problem. Ice gathered annually around the shoreline and threatened the drilling machinery. A standard offshore platform was not enough protection.

BP is forging ahead on plans to drill from Northstar in spite of the Obama administration's six-month offshore drilling moratorium. The company's rationale? As an island, and not an offshore platform, Northstar is exempt.

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7. Neft Daşları "Oil Rocks"

Azerbaijan's coast is frizzed with slapdash peninsulas of raised roads, building clusters and oil wells, and one dominates the tangle: Neft Daşları, called "Oil Rocks" in English. Oil Rocks is a monument to development that is unchained by nuisances like planning and safety regulations. Roads loop through 600 oil wells, blocks of apartments, a movie theatre, a bakery, a school and a helipad. The labyrinth rides on the backs of sunken ships and debris piled to brace the impromptu city's growth. Today, not everything is still above water and only a third of the wells still work, but Oil Rocks still pumps out more than half of the oil in Azerbaijan.

[More information: 1. Oil Rocks: The Offshore City of Neft Daşları; 2. Neft Daşları.]

8. Amwaj Islands, Bahrain

These islands of expensive residential real estate lie northeast of Bahrain, fronting the sea and artificial lagoons. They are exemplary both for their innovations in engineering and land ownership laws. When building it, construction crews fenced in the island's perimeters with miles of geotubes, hydraulically filled tubes of sand. And when the lots went on the market, the government made an exception and allowed foreigners to buy them. Previously, foreigners could only rent land.

[More information] [Amwaj Islands Website]

9. Kansai International Airport

Kansai International Airport is an early exemplar of what is now a handful of East Asian airports built on artificial islands. It is earthquake- and typhoon-resistant, and proven against both.

The lessons learned in building this island up from the silted floor of Osaka Bay saved headaches and bank accounts when construction began on other artificial island airports. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for Kansai itself, which shot far over budget.

In 1987, builders erected Kansai's seawall, then excavated three mountains on the mainland to fill in the island. Its engineers knew the land would compress slowly downward soon after it was poured, but the island dropped further and quicker than anyone had guessed. To keep the travellers dry while the land sinks, the terminal is fitted with modular, adjustable columns, extended with steel plates at their bases as needed.

[More information: 1. Kansai International Airport; 2. Kansai Airport.]

10. Spiral Island II, Mexico

This floating island near Isla Mujeres and Cancun, Mexico, is the concoction of a mad eco-genius named Richie Sowa, a British expatriate who made his island out of more than 100,000 plastic bottles that he salvaged from the trash. As its name implies, Spiral Island II is the second incarnation of the dream: the first island wrecked against the mainland in Hurricane Emily in 2005.

The island is about 60 feet in diameter, covered in sand, plants and mangrove trees. It even has a pool in the centre where Sowa stashed another, miniature floating island for ducks. To get to shore, which is only 20-30 feet away, he pulls a rope and hauls the entire island by hand. To make his recycled paradise, Sowa packed bottles into plastic mesh bags and fishing nets. He lashed those to the bottom sides of wooden pallets, which form the island's foundation. Construction continues through a hole in the surface; Sowa uses a rod to push more bags of bottles into the water and underneath the island.

[More information: 1. Spiral Island; 2. Spiral Island II - The Floating Plastic Island.] [Related Post]

11. Dubai's Palm Islands and Coastline

Dubai's coast has grown garish with stylized beachfront lots for the wealthy. To date, there are two palm-tree-shaped islands crowned with sandy crescent strips with a planned third one on the way. There's also an inaccurate world map of sandy plots arranged in an oval, collectively called The World, and an island built for the world's only seven-star hotel, the Burj Al Arab.

Jumeirah is the smallest palm island and the first one built. To make it, dredger ships pumped sand from the sea floor and spewed it out in an arc onto the site of the island's crescent breakwater. The builders covered it with an erosion-resistant cloth, then stacked layers of rocks on the sand. Then, assisted by GPS, they pumped sand inside the breakwater to carefully form the 16 fronds of the palm. The crescent is sliced twice with wide openings to allow the seawater to circulate and prevent stagnation.

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12. U Thant Island, Manhattan

Ever wonder where the land went after it was cleared from New York's subway tunnels during their construction? Well, the rocks hauled from the IRT Flushing line (7), the tunnel under the East River that connects Manhattan to Astoria, Queens, made this island. Officially, it's called Belmont Island, named for the man who financed the tunnel's completion in 1907, August Belmont Jr. It's more commonly called U Thant Island, though, and the reason why is an odd story.

New Yorkers ignored the island while trains passed under it for 70 years. Then, in 1977, a religious group at the United Nations Headquarters adopted it and unofficially dubbed it U Thant, after the former UN secretary general who was a friend of the group's guru, the interfaith chaplain Sri Chinmov. The new caretakers erected a metal "oneness arch" that stores some of Thant's personal items for posterity. While the 2004 Republican Convention was in town, a man named Duke Riley, who makes a point of visiting the abandoned islands in New York's rivers, rowed a boat at night to U Thant Island. He declared it a sovereign nation and flew a huge pennant adorned with two electric eels from the island's navigation tower. He filmed the operation, was not arrested and the island remains firmly integrated into the rest of American territory.

[More information: 1. U Thant Island by Wikipedia; 2. U Thant Island by New York Daily Photo.]

13. Dutch Flevoland

There's a saying about the Netherlands and its massive, centuries-long earthworks: "God created the world, but the Dutch created Holland." While draining their God-given lakes and seas to make land, the Dutch also happened to create the world's largest artificial island.

In 1920, Holland began building a dyke that closed off the Zuiderzee, a shallow bay in the northeast of the Netherlands. Over the following decades, they drained the land in stages to create what is now called Flevoland, a province of polders – reclaimed land. Flevopolder is the combined land of two polders, one created in the 1950s and the other in the 1960s. A dyke divides Flevopolder's two parts and diesel- and electric-powered water pumps keep them dry. If one of its parts should flood, the dyke protects the other. Their architects left a ribbon of water between the old coastline and the newly dry land to allow for sea access.

Unlike other islands in this gallery, Flevopolder was not raised above the water level. Surrounded by water and reclaimed from the sea, Flevopolder is, however, an artificial island.

[More information: 1. Flevoland by Wikipedia; 2. Flevoland by Holland.com.]

14. Floating Mountain of Immortals

From a distance, the floating Island of the Immortals looks like a plate of lead melting in the sun. Up close, you can see that it's a steel sculpture of an eclectic bunch of subjects. Anchored in the North Sea, several hundred yards from the Belgian coast and a mile north of the Netherlands, it's a bizarre installation by the Chinese artist Zhan Wang. The island is part of the Beaufort Art Trail, a collection of international exhibits dotting the 42 miles of the Belgian shore. Wang is known for his steel sculptures, though they are not all as large as this one. Emblems from mythology, the past and the future are immortalized on the island, including a fisherman, an elf, a cell phone and a computer.

[More information] [More images]

15. Floating Island on the Mur

The Murinsel, German for "Mur Island," is an upside down turtle shell in the river Mur in Graz, Austria. Its steel-latticed glass and vaguely geodesic shape invoke artists' renderings of the deep marine cities where our grandchildren will probably vacation some day. At night, the island glows blue like a billboard for the Tron sequel. It is 155 feet in diameter, topped with a playground and an amphitheatre. Under the waterline, there's a café and bar. It looks as if it's suspended between bridges to both of the Mur's shores, but it's actually on a floating platform.

The island is a cross-cultural endeavour: a New York-based architect, Vito Acconci, designed it to mark Graz's designation as the European Capital of Culture in 2003.

[More information: 1. Murinsel; 2. Mur Island.]

16. Kamfers Dam, South Africa

An "S"-shaped island behind Kamfers Dam near Kimberley, South Africa, is crammed shore to shore with flamingos. An ornithologist named Mark Anderson oversaw construction of the island in 2006 as a sanctuary for the birds. The "S" shape creates two flamingo-friendly bays. There are four ponds fed by a solar-powered electric water pump, and the builders erected 1000 artificial nests for the new residents. Word spread in the migrating flamingo community, however, and the island's popularity overtook its housing capacity. When the artificial nests were occupied, newcomers built their own using clay from the ponds.

Now there are at least 10,000 flamingos migrating to and from the island. Part of its appeal is the buffet of blue-green algae, diatoms, insects and small fish in the surrounding artificial lake and wetlands. Now, the island is one of only a handful of Lesser Flamingo breeding colonies in the world.

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17. Floating Islands on the Han River

Image source

The city of Seoul, South Korea, unveiled in 2011 three huge solar-powered floating islands – the world’s first - that anchor in the river Han. The Han traverses the nation's capital and lets out into the Yellow Sea, which South Koreans tend to call the West Sea, the one between their country and China.

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The islands are meant to rival and outsize those in the rivers of other cities, such as the Murinsel, featured here, and the Floating Garden in Rostock, Germany. The three Korean islands range in size from 4000 square feet to more than 15,400 square meters and together cost more than $80 million. Large, shore-bound 10-foot-high buoys are chained to 500-ton blocks on the river floor and float on airbags. The buoys support up to 6400 tons. The city's masterminds behind the islands hope they become Seoul's new cultural hubs.

[More information: 1. Seoul Floating Islands; 2. World’s First Solar-Powered Floating Island Opens in Seoul!] [Floating Island Official Website]

18. Umihotaru

A 9-kilometre-long hybrid of a bridge and a tunnel called the Tokyo Bay Aqua Line link the cities of Kawasaki and Kisarazu across Japan’s Tokyo Bay. The bridge meets the tunnel at Umihotaru, an artificial island, tourist attraction and rest area in the water. The Aqua Line’s toll is steep, but for high-rolling drivers, it cuts the commute between the cities from an hour and a half to 15 minutes. Another nearby artificial island ventilates the tunnel and is powered by the near-constant winds across the bay.

[More information: 1. Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line; 2. Tokyo Bay Aqualine]

Top image: Amwaj Islands, Bahrain (left) and Dubai's Palm Islands (right)

[Source: Popular Mechanics. Edited and updated. Some images and links added.]