I was looking at aerial images of the US base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean on Google Maps and noticed lots of quite regular rectangular holes seemingly cut/blasted out of the coral just off shore. [utl=http://goo.gl/maps/LU7U5]See here.
Why would this have been done? I could see the point in blasting a channel right through a coral reef to allow ships through, but these holes don’t extend right the way out to open water, and there are loads of them. The only other explanation I can think of was removal of coral as a building material, but that seems rather haphazard for building a military base.
IIRC, crushed up coral was used instead of gravel to lay down a lot of the roads on Diego Garcia. That was quite a while ago, though, and I don’t remember seeing holes in the coral, but that could just be that after a while, I stopped paying much attention to the area.
Beach, ocean, trees, rocks…120 days until I go home.
Beach, ocean, trees, rocks… 119 days until I go home.
Beach ocean, trees, rocks… 118 days until I go home.
etc.
etc.
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Why? if they need landfill material they either need to ship in in from thousands of km away (slow and expensive), dredge it off the seabed (faster and cheaper but needs special equipment, may be loose sand and not suitable), or bulldoze it out of some part of the island (quick & easy). It’s not like there are any locals to complain about spoiling the beach.
My guess would have been excavating fill for extending the land area. I think the original shoreline was along where the inner road runs (similar to how it is further along eclipse bay) and the area of the square harbour and large dock plus the CONEX ‘park’ was all built with landfill. Most material would have come from dredging the shipping channels but it would also have been easy to scoop some additional material from the coral shelf. Another possibility would be pushing material out towards the ocean to make a broader wave barrier and prevent storms pushing waves onto the island and flooding parts of it - but digging landfill seems more likely.
Hadn’t noticed I’d screwed up the tags there. Here is that link again. And yes, I suppose digging up coral is a good alternative to shipping in landfill. Don’t tell the greens!
Could be worse - there are a couple of excavated areas on Cudjoe Key on the north shore where they dug out what appear to be a couple slips for boats - I am guessing that the area was some sort of former government property back in WW2 - the area is just east of the Blimp Station. Between Cuthroat and Blimp Roads. I like the one closer to Blimp Road, I figure that would be a great place to put up a house and finish up the cuts to have a safer mooring place for a boat. You would just have to put in a driveway, the sewage/water systems and electricity. It is part of a 5 acre lot which unfortunately seems to cost $5 million, so it is way out of our budget!
The relief picture is bad but I don’t think they’re man-made. They can’t be shoring works along the narrow portion of the island. They’re too irregular. They look like fracture patterns and other natural structures on the layer of limestone. I mean, why excavate near your man-made structures and leave them un-touched in the outward parts away from the facilities?
OK, looking at the Egmont Islands, the two are very similar but for those rectangular shapes. Yes, they appear to be dredging sites. Just don’t know how you could quarry limestone blocks at sites that are alternately submerged every 12 hours. You have substantial earthworks on the north east side for the harbor and jetties. No need to double-handle whole blocks of limestone only to crush them.
To get materials to for building your structures on/with? The coral islands I have been on were not notable for their broad expanses of solid, level ground, to put it mildly.
Uh, what? Quarrying? Double-handling? More likely just bulldozer + ripper, possibly with a bit of explosives. Or even just an ordinary backhoe with a special bucket like these. Coral rock is pretty soft and full of joints and flaws, its not like excavating through marble or something.
I assume we’ll be able to build a long term lease into any deal between Mauritius and Britain. The snag could be in allowing the original inhabitants of the archipelago to return after the Brits forced them out so we could have the base. It’s not clear to me why they couldn’t occupy the rest of the archipelago.
